
*fW- - ■■ fopsngW |„ ■.; I 

f UNITED STATES OF C AilfRICA. f 







SERMONS 



EEV. P. B. HAUGHWOUT, A. M. 



A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 

BY HIS WIFE, 



AN INTRODUCTION BY REV. V. R. HOTCHKISS, D. D. 



Pmorial d&bitioir. 




BOSTON: 
NICHOLS & HALL 

18 7 8. 



*j\ 



<V 



-S/6 33 3 






1877, 
By MES. P. B. HAUGHWOUT. 



Printed by 
Alfbed Mtjbgb & Son, Boston. 



LC Control Number 



111 

tm P 96 031691 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Introduction 5 

Biographical Sketch 7 



SERMONS. 

L Religion develops Character. Pro v. xxiii, 7 . 39 

II. Through Suffering. John xvii, 24 . . . . 49 

III. Christian Determination. 1 Cor. ii, 2 . . . 57 

IV. Dead Flies. Eccl. x, 1 68 

V. The Open Door. John x, 9 82 

VI. Analogy as confirming Christian Doctrines. 

Prov. x, 16 96 

VH. Christ Suffering. Luke xxiv, 26 ... 108 

VIII. Christ Crucified. Luke xxiv, 26 ... . 120 

IX. Christ Risen. Luke xxiv, 5, 6 133 

X. Bowing in the House of Rlmmon. 2 Kings v, 18 . 144 

XI. Peter's Resolve. Matt, xxvi, 33 ... . 157 

XII. The Heavenly Promise. Matt, xi, 28 . 169 

XIII. The Ark in the House. 2 Sam. vi, 11 . . . 184 

XIV. Reason of the Faith. 1 Peter iii, 15 198 
XV. Baptism. Romans vi, 4 221 

XVI. The Sinner's Love, the Saviour's Forgiveness. 

Lukevii,47 231 

XVII. Jacob wrestling with God. Gen. xxxii, 24-26 . 243 

XVIIL Orpah and Ruth. Ruth i, 14 255 

XIX Parable of the Unjust Steward. Luke xvi, 1-12, 268 

XX. The Woman of Samaria. John iv, 29 . . . 279 



4 CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

XXI. Looking on Christ at the Judgment. Rev. i, 7, 293 

XXII. Where are we ? 1 Tim. iv, 1 308 

XXIII. " I go A fishing." John xxi, 3 . . . .321 

XXIV. Joy of Christ's Fellowship. Matt, xi, 6 . . 333 
XXV. The Fulness of Christ. Col. iii, 11 . .347 

XXVI. Paul and Silas praying in Prison. Acts xvi, 

25,26 361 

XX VIE. "Not by Might nor by Power, but by my 

Spirit." Joshua vi, 20 373 

XXVIII. Christian Warfare. 2 Tim. vi, 7 . . . .387 
XXIX. The Christian Race. 2 Tim. iv,7 . . . . 394 

XXX. Faith. 2 Tim. iv, 7 403 

XXXI. "Ready to be offered." 2 Tim. iv, 6 . . .413 



INTEODUCTIOlSr 



The writer of this note has had no opportunity to read 
any of the discourses contained in this volume, but his 
acquaintance with their author gives him ground of assur- 
ance as to their exceptional merits. That acquaintance has 
been of long standing; and it has been intimate, even to the 
point of the freest and fullest interchange of views on a great 
variety of subjects. If the sermons are a fair outcome of 
the man, as I have known him, they will be found worthy of 
a permanent place in our religious literature. 

They were not written, I suppose, with any view to publi- 
cation; and they were prepared and delivered, I learn, in the 
early period of Mr. Haughwout's ministry. Had they been 
given to the public under his own eye, they would, doubtless, 
have been first subjected to careful revision and severe 
pruning, and would have received, in some parts, that larger 
and weightier exposition of which his matured strength was 
capable; yet as they are, they will reveal to the reader a 
rare combination of wide investigation, penetrating thought, 
poetical fervor, and robust faith in the great fundamental 
facts and doctrines of the gospel of Christ. 

Mr. Haughwout had gathered and mastered and appropri- 
ated for use a larger range and variety of "knowledges ,r 
than any other man of his years whom it has been my good 
fortune to know, and the critical accuracy and orderly 
arrangement of his acquisitions were as marked as the 
abounding fulness of his researches. What he knew he 
knew scientifically. In these respects he was a marvel and a 
mystery to many. To them it almost seemed that knowledge 
was born in him. But there are those who know that all this; 
wealth of mental possessions had been garnered by an indus- 
try that never tired, and by an intellectual watchfulness* 



6 INTRODUCTION. 

that was always on the alert for fact and truth. His life was 
a constant and strenuous tasking of himself in the pursuit of 
knowledge and self-culture; and the result was a mind 
filled to an extent and disciplined to a degree far beyond the 
average of even the higher educational attainments. 

Mr. Haughwout was scrupulously conscientious in all his 
mental processes. Of everything like inexactness in think- 
ing and slovenliness of speech he had a horror as of a sin. 
Both in thought and language he aimed at precision, even to 
the utmost point of accuracy. That he always attained, we 
neither afiirm nor believe; but he sought this goal of excel- 
lence under the spur and rein of a self -discipline that brought 
him well on towards it. 

To as many, therefore, as knew our departed friend in the 
delightful companionship of his living presence, this vol- 
ume will be a welcome gift; and to such as did not thus 
know him, it is commended as revealing something of a 
noble and highly cultured Christian manhood, consecrated to 
the service of Christ, and of the truth as it is in Him. 

It is not to be expected that all the positions and state- 
ments to be found in the following pages will command uni- 
versal assent. Mr. Haughwout was a self-trained and 
independent thinker, and as such he will probably be found 
to have thought differently, on some points, from many in 
our body ecclesiastic; or, at least, to have expressed his 
thought in an unusual form. "We believe, nevertheless, that 
nothing will be found that need disturb the settled, evangel- 
ical view of Scriptural teaching on the great themes that are 
here handled. 

The main blemish in the style of these discourses will 
probably be found in a redundancy of rhetorical ornament, 
owing, in part, to the fact of their composition in the early 
period of the author's ministry, but due also, in part, to his 
poetical temperament, and to his uncommon facility in sum- 
moning troops of words to his service. 

With these few words of introduction, the accompanying 
volume is committed to the kind consideration of those into 
whose hands it may come, with the prayer that the blessing 
of God may rest upon it, and make it a spiritual good to many 
hearts. 



SKETCH OF THE LIFE 



PETER BKETTON HAUGHWOUT. 



Peter Britton Haughwout was born at Tomp- 
kins ville, Staten Islaud, May 25, 1828. His paternal 
ancestors were from Germany, and were among the 
earliest settlers of the island. His father, Winant 
Haughwout, was a man of sterling integrity and 
uprightness of moral character. He was at one time 
engaged in successful business in New York, but 
through financial reverses lost his property, which 
determined him to remove West in the hope of 
retrieving his fortunes. He accordingly settled with 
his family in Adrian, Michigan. 

His mother, Sarah Britton Haughwout, is sup- 
posed to be of French extraction, a descendant of 
the De Brittany Huguenots who fled to this country 
for religious freedom at the time of the revocation of 
the Edict of Nantes. With such an ancestry, it is no 
wonder their son early manifested a thoughtful turn 
of mind. He was carefully trained in the faith of 
the Dutch Keformed Church, of which his parents 
were members, and which, without questioning, he 



8 LIFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGHWOUT. 

obediently attended, until, in his early manhood, he 
was converted, and united with the Baptist Church, 
to which faith he remained ever a firm adherent. It 
was an incident of no little interest that his parents 
about this time underwent an entire change of doc- 
trinal views, and were baptized the same day with 
their son, his father afterward holding the office of 
deacon until his death. 

Of the early developments of Mr. Haughwout's 
mental gifts and impressionable nature, his mother, 
a bright, intelligent lady, now seventy-two years of 
age, whose vigor of intellect seems unabated, 
proudly recounts many manifestations. Of an 
ardent, impulsive temperament and the quickest 
imaginable sensibilities, he could never bear the sight 
of pain or suffering, and has often been known to 
weep over a bird that had been wantonly killed. 

When he was six and a half years of age, he lost 
a sister two years younger than himself, an event 
that prostrated his mother with grief. The little 
fellow was greatly perplexed and distressed by her 
sorrow. After trying in vain to console her, he sud- 
denly ran from the room, presently returning, bring- 
ing in his small hands an open Bible, with his finger 
pointing to the words, K Suffer little children to come 
unto me." "Mamma," he joyfully exclaimed, "hear 
what Jesus says ! " and then he read, with an eager- 
ness indescribable, those words which have soothed 
so many stricken hearts. " Don't you know little 
sister has gone to Jesus, and you will go too some 
time? O mamma, don't cry, since you know sister 



LIFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGHWOUT. y 

is so happy !" "And," said his mother, "his prattle 
cheered me more than all the minister said." So 
early in life did he assume the office of comforter. 

Although an extremely playful boy, his natural 
vivacity urging him to an excess of activity, his thirst 
for knowledge, which in his later years became the 
ruling passion of his life, began in his extreme youth 
to show itself. Faithful in his attendance upon school, 
carefully studious and thorough in whatever he under- 
took, possessed of a quick, penetrating mind and a 
retentive memory, what marvel that his progress was 
both rapid and sure ! When he was thirteen years of 
age, he sustained the fracture of a thigh, from which 
misfortune he had scarcely recovered when the acci- 
dent was repeated. During all the months of weary 
confinement, his sole grief was because of the ban- 
ishment of his books, the use of which his physician 
had unwisely interdicted, and which decree he was 
obliged to revoke, saying to the lad's mother, "Let 
him have his books, let him have his books ! I never 
saw so strange a child. Pain seems nothing to him : 
he is fretting himself to death for books ! " And, 
placed in a frame and fastened to the bed, his hands 
being too small to steady it, he read through Horn's 
"Introduction to the Bible," — a child but thirteen 
years of age ! He carried all his life the little Latin 
Testament which had already become his constant 
companion. 

Soon after his recovery, his father settled upon 
a farm. This event, which removed the boy from the 
reach of schools, marks an epoch in his life. All his 



10 LIFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGHWOUT. 

ambition, all his desires for scholastic attainments, all 
the latent forces of his character, were aroused. After 
carefully surveying the situation, and balancing its 
obstacles against his aspirations, he formed a decision 
from which no subsequent adverse circumstances 
were ever able to swerve him. He at once inaugu- 
rated a systematic course in English Literature, Latin, 
and Greek, although often obtaining with great diffi- 
culty the text-books he needed. His method of 
study was necessarily somewhat peculiar. His means 
not permitting the aid of masters, and his services 
being often called into requisition on the farm, his 
mornings were given to manual labor as long as his 
strength would permit; then quickly disappearing 
into his room, and exchanging his working for his 
in-door dress, he would apply himself with character- 
istic energy, the remainder of the day and usually 
far into the night, to study. When he was sixteen 
years of age, the calamity which had twice pros- 
trated him was experienced for the third time, and 
the surgeon declared amputation absolutely necessary. 
Here the young man's determination and force of will 
served him to a purpose. " What ! cripple me for 
life ?" he asked. "You shall never do it." "But 
you'll not live," the surgeon remonstrated. "Then 
I '11 die, but I '11 die a whole man," he responded. Con- 
trary to all expectations, he recovered and lived, a 
" whole man," and pursued his routine of manual and 
intellectual labor as vigorously as ever. In the winter 
of his sixteenth year he added to his duties those of 
teacher in a public school, which position he filled 



LIFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGHWOUT. 11 

for three successive winters, using the long nights for 
study. 

To give an idea of the results of this incessant 
application, one fact must be stated. When he was 
about eighteen years of age he was examined by the 
faculty of Michigan University as preliminary to his 
entering that institution as a pupil, the means for 
which had been generously volunteered by Baptist 
friends ; but he was found already so far in advance 
of their prescribed curriculum, in some departments; 
his scholarship exceeding that of their graduates, that 
they advised him to forego the merely nominal advan- 
tage it would be to him, and to give no further- 
thought to the matter of a college course. 

But these days and nights of unremitting effort 
began to tell seriously upon a constitution by nature 
the most delicate, audit became a matter of frequent 
occurrence for his mother, ever anxious about him, 
upon feigning an errand to his room, to find him 
lying upon the floor, his book by his side, his hands 
dropped helplessly down, his brain unconscious from 
exhaustion. What wonder was it that, in his nine- 
teenth year, he was suddenly attacked with brain- 
fever, from which his physician expressed the opinion 
that he could not possibly recover. This incautious 
remark was uttered in the presence, and during a 
lucid interval of the sufferer. "Not live, not live !" 
he moaned. " Why, doctor, I have done nothing yet, 
not even attained my majority ; and do you dare to 
say I am not to live? But /say I will live, and by 
God's help will do some work, too." How well he 



12 LIFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGHWOUT. 

succeeded in his determination the abundant manu- 
scripts he has left of sermons, lectures, addresses, 
and scientific work bear witness. 

Soon after his restoration to health, through his 
own desire and the expressed wishes of his friends, 
his mind was seriously directed towards the law, for 
which profession he seemed to have special abilities ; 
but after earnest, careful, and conscientious delibera- 
tion he decided that the pulpit, and not the forum, 
was the congenial arena for his work. He therefore 
applied for, and obtained a licence from the Lenawee 
Michigan Association to preach, and assumed the 
charge of the Baptist Church in Hudson, Michigan, 
entering upon the service with great relish. His first 
sermon was based upon the words of Paul, " God 
forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our 
Lord Jesus Christ." This theme always sounded the 
deepest wells of his spiritual nature, and drew thence 
the purest, sweetest, most satisfying draughts. 

About this time he commenced the study of the 
Hebrew language, under a tutor, making marvellous 
progress. One circumstance relating to this period 
of his life, as told by his tutor, will bear repetition. 
Returning home one hot summer afternoon from the 
institution where he had charge of the Latin and 
Greek languages, the tutor was confronted at his 
door by his pupil, book in hand. Retiring with the 
young man to a private room, and throwing himself 
down at his ease, he listened to page after page, page 
upon page, until his patience was fairly exhausted. 
Suddenly charging down upon the offending victim, 



LTFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGHWOUT. 13 

" How many more pages have you ? " "Oh, I don't know ; 
perhaps twenty." The tutor scanned him in absolute 
amazement, as if to ascertain of what stuff he was made, 
and then said, " Take the book and go home, my friend. 
We have both had enough of it for one day." . 

When he was twenty-one years of age, in May, 
1849, he was ordained to the work of the gospel min- 
istry, in the church which he had served as a licen- 
tiate two years. He remained in Hudson but six 
months after his ordination, but those who are left 
of his old pastorate remember with deep interest 
the young man whom they styled "the eloquent boy 
preacher," so many years ago. 

While he was in this church, the work which he 
longed to accomplish he did not realize. Spiritual 
life seemed at a low ebb throughout the country, 
and but few were added to their number while he 
remained with them, and those only by letter. But 
at that date the position of the pastor of a Western 
village church was no sinecure. Often, during what 
they termed the " sickly season," was he called upon 
to attend funerals eight, ten, twelve miles out in the 
country, paying his own expenses, returning jaded, 
ill from exposure, without having received a word of 
approval. "Well," he would sometimes say, "am I 
not the servant of the people? The servant must not 
be greater than his Lord." 

In April of the following year, 1850, he was mar- 
ried to Mary L., daughter of Rev. L. Hotchkiss, of 
Medina, Michigan, and sister of Rev. Dr. Hotchkiss, 
of Buffalo, New York. 



14 LIFE OF PETER BEITTON HAUGHWOUT. 

His next pastorate, in Tecnmseh, Michigan, was 
but for a year, circumstances having decided him to 
turn his steps eastward. Accordingly he accepted an 
invitation from the First Baptist Church in Nunda, 
Livingston County, New York. Here again the work 
proved too heavy for him. The church numbered 
seven hundred. He preached three times on the Sab- 
bath, and attended one evening service during the 
week ; also his hours of study were increasing, 
rather than diminishing, and were prolonged until 
two or three o'clock in the night. He broke down 
utterly, and tendered his resignation after but nine 
months. One drop of joy he experienced here ; he 
had the pleasure of baptizing a few converts into the 
fellowship of the church. 

In August of the same year, he retired to his 
fathers farm, seeking in freedom from care the 
recuperation he needed in order to the fresh prosecu- 
tion of his work. After a year of relaxation, he 
again assayed to preach, supplying for a few months 
churches in the vicinity of Buffalo, remaining a guest 
in the home of his wife's brother, Dr. Hotchkiss. 
During this interval of rest, he accompanied Dr. 
Hotchkiss to Rochester, where the doctor was deliv- 
ering lectures in the theological seminary. 

While there, he entered the college and witnessed 
the examination of the Greek class. The professor 
in charge, for some reason, failed to recall a techni- 
cal term, and appealed to the class. No one was able 
to rescue him from his dilemma until Dr. Hotchkiss 
quietly suggested that if he should ask "this young 



LIFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGHWOUT. 15 

man," indicating young Haughwout, "he thought he 
would get what he wanted." The invitation was 
given. Quick as thought the "young man," blush- 
ing with modesty, gave "what was wanted," and 
thereupon had to finish the lesson himself. This 
incident so interested the professor that he prevailed 
upon young Haughwout to allow himself to be 
brought before the faculty, and after a brief, sharp 
examination, they conferred upon him the degree of 
A. M. in honor of his rare attainments. 

In the winter of 1853-4 he accepted an invitation 
to the pastorate of the First Baptist Church in Medina, 
New York. His efforts with this people resulted 
rather in a gradual building up, and cementing of the 
component parts of the body, than in any special and 
marked interest. He labored here three years, and 
while his earnest desires for the conversion of sin- 
ners were not crowned with success, he stamped his 
impress upon the church in the moulding, transform- 
ing influence of knowledge and culture. In the 
winter of 1856-7 he accepted a unanimous invitation 
to the pastorate of the First Baptist Church in Fall 
River, Massachusetts, which for a term of fifteen 
years he served with all the fulness of his matured 
powers. It was a subject of deep grief to him 
that he did not witness those results of his ministry 
for which he longed. Often, returning home from 
some special effort, into which he had thrown all the 
earnestness of his nature, fired by love for Christ 
and man, in the extremest dejection, walking the 
floor for hours, his hands clasped, his head bowed, 



16 LIFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGHWOUT. 

his whole appearance that of profoundest sorrow, 
reiterating, "Of what use are encomiums upon my 
preaching ? What does it all amount to ? Nothing, 
less than nothing, while they do not heed my Mas- 
ter's message. Where are the results of my work? 
I cannot go on in this way. I cannot bear it ! " 
And when at last he was permitted ,to lead into the 
church a goodly company, who ascribed their sal- 
vation, under God, to the influence of his preaching, 
his joy was as extreme as his sorrow had been, and 
drew from him the remark, " I think I am too happy 
to live ! " 

In the fifth year of his connection with this people, 
they generously provided the means, and granted him 
leave of absence for an extended foreign tour ; and 
in August, 1860, he sailed for Liverpool. The jour- 
nal which he has left gives abundant proof of the 
intense pleasure and large profit derived from his 
travels. Objects of interest received more than a 
cursory glance ; they were studied thoroughly, 
incorporated into his life, made a part of himself, for 
purposes of future use. Each seemed invested with 
some special charm for him ; each contributed to 
the enlargement of his nature and the development 
of his spiritual life. But it was when standing on 
Mars Hill, and recalling the scenes in the life of that 
wonderful man, whose connection with the spot 
has immortalized it for all time, that his religious 
emotions were stirred to their depths. He lingered 
upon its sacred soil as long as time would allow, loath 
to take his departure ; and when at last he turned to 



LIFE OF PETER BFJTTON HAUGHWOUT. 17 

go, he felt his "eyes fill with tears and his heart too 
full for utterance." After seven months of profitable 
travel, he returned to his people with recuperated 
health and quickened spirit, and entered upon his 
work with fresh zest. 

Soon after his return, the Rebellion rang out its 
first defiant note, and his patriotic soul was fired 
with indignation. His labors in support of the Union 
were incessant. His manuscripts show an immense 
amount of work done in this direction, as well as 
in his own legitimate field. He gave his services 
eagerly, unsparingly, and only regretted his inability 
for more severe labors. 

During the year 1868 he frequently supplied the 
Eowe Street Church, Boston, Massachusetts, of which 
Dr. Baron Stow had been so long the beloved pastor, 
and which has been since changed to the Clarendon 
Street, with Rev. Mr. Gordon as its pastor. In 1859 
he was elected to the Board of Overseers of Harvard 
College, Cambridge, wdiich position he filled with 
credit to himself for a period of six years, acting as 
president of the Greek committee, and having charge 
of the annual examination of the Greek classes. 

Yet, never- allowing his severe labors to interfere 
with his prescribed course of study, he pursued an 
uninterrupted routine in languages, classics, sciences, 
and general literature, that reminds one of those 
curious animals whose gormandizing only whets the 
appetite for more food. He seized upon every line 
of research with avidity, and about this time enlarged 
his knowledge of Natural History by scrutinizing 



18 LIFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGI1WOUT. 

closely the habits of the spider for the, space of two 
years, finding his morning recreation in capturing and 
confining them in glass tubes. Yet he never seemed 
to lose sisrht of or forget for a moment the work to 
which he had devoted his life, and was never so happy 
as when imparting some Bible truth, which seemed, 
under his handling, to take on new beauty and force. 
Said one of his friends, "Never shall I forgot the 
conversation we had on the last Sunday of his life, 
as we walked over the old ground we had travelled 
so much, and I listened to his views upon certain 
passages of Scripture. It was sweet beyond ex- 
pression." 

But his health was rapidly sinking, his periods of 
enforced rest becoming more frequent, and the hearts 
of his friends were growing like lead ! In 1870 a 
great affliction overtook him in the death of his faith- 
ful friend, Dr. Eli Thurston, who had been for twenty- 
two years the able pastor of the Central Congrega- 
tional Church of Fall River, with whom he had ex- 
changed pulpits every month for many years. His 
soul was knit to the soul of this excellent man like 
that of David to Jonathan's. He never seemed to 
recover from this bereavement, any allusion to his 
friend always bringing a rush of emotion, and the 
injunction to be " laid, at the last, by his side." 
During this year he became so much disheartened 
by his repeated attacks of illness and his consequent 
failure to fill his appointments with the church, that he 
formally resigned his long pastorate. 

After a few months of rest, he consented to act, 



LIFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGHWOUT\ 19 

in the absence of any pastor, as supply for the First 
Baptist Church of Dunkirk, New York. He served 
this church for two years with great acceptance, 
though with frequent interruptions from illness. He 
always retained a warm affection for and interest in 
this people, and spoke of them with great pleasure. 
In the winter of 1873 he accepted -his last invitation, 
and entered upon the pastorate of the First Baptist 
Church in Jamestown, New York. 

Here his overwrought nerves seemed for a time gal- 
vanized into fresh life, and his mind appeared to take 
on new vigor as he rambled over the ghrious hills 
and through the lovely valleys that skirt and beautify 
the picturesque shores of Chatauqua Lake. Here, 
too, he entered, with all the ardor of his enthusiastic 
nature, into scientific work, and made careful and 
thorough investigation into the world of infinitesimal 
life, discernible only through the medium of a pow- 
erful microscope. How vividly his friends will recall 
the picture made by him and his companion, Prof. H. 
S. Albro, walking with quick, energetic step, or 
slowly, arm in arm, and with evident effort, as his 
mood or strength would allow, in the direction of some 
stream, with little phials and ladles with which to 
secure the prey ; then the triumphant return, and 
eager examination of the prizes, his face aglow with 
interest, his whole being aroused, pain and weariness 
forgotten, enthusiasm at white heat, and the words 
forcing themselves from his lips in a rushing torrent 
for hours, until reminded by exhaustion how he had 
overrun the limits of prudence. 



20 LIFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGHWOUT. 

His study presented, at this time, a singular and 
somewhat startling appearance. Books upon almost 
every imaginable subject lined the walls; current 
periodicals scattered about on tables or on the floor ; 
every chair in proximity to his piled with the books 
he happened to be using ; two or three of the latest 
modern and ancient atlases lying open, in utter dis- 
regard of the remonstrance of the bindings ; lexicons 
standing so close to his chair that, upon rising to greet 
a visitor, his quick, energetic movements rarely failed 
to topple over one row, at least ; a collection of ancient 
and modem coins, now on exhibition in Brown Uni- 
versity ; on one side a mineralogical cabinet, many of 
whose treasures had been polished by himself; a case 
of moths and butterflies put up by himself, the nets 
in which they had been caught lying close at hand ; 
canes from all parts of the world, Indian curiosities 
and relics, pictures of churches and cathedrals hang- 
ing on the walls ; and, placed in position to secure the 
most effective light, his microscope, at once his solace 
and instructor ; these all combined to perfect a place 
which he appropriately named his "working den." 

Still, with harrying pain now a constant guest, 
laboring through two revivals during his three years' 
pastorate (in which the divine favor set its seal upon 
his ministry by adding to the church more than fifty 
souls), assisting in establishing a young people's 
church society, delivering frequent lectures and 
addresses, he yet achieved the labor of compiling 
and leaving ready for publication a valuable work 
on microscopy, with colored plates, illustrative of 



LIFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGHWOUT. 21 

his discoveries. His scientific work was his recrea- 
tion ; his forte was preaching. This he entered into 
with all the fire and tenacity of a first love, and 
when his friends ventured to suggest a professorship, 
as the means of lightening his labors and prolonging 
his useful life, he would never entertain the thought 
for an instant. 

"No, no ! " he would exclaim. "I'll die with my 
legitimate working dress on. I put it on in my youth : 
when God wants it off, He must remove it. I never 
will." And now the book of his life is nearing its 
closing page, "his story its saddest leaf." Although 
the poem which is here introduced, bearing his signa- 
ture, has no date, it was probably written about this 
period, as indicative of his sorrowful presentiments. 

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE ? 

One day of wailing when life is begun, 
One day of sorrow when life is done, 
One long day between of trouble and care, — 
And behold, life's story is written there! 

A dew-drop bright on a spider's thread, 
A fleecy cloud with the rainbow spread, 
A fire-fly's flash on the evening air, — 
And behold, life's frailty written there! 

A lily-white cheek with its bloodless veins, 
A rosy cheek with its hectic stains, 
So fair and so frail, so bright and so brief ! 
Look, and see of life's story the saddest leaf. 

Two pale hands crossed on the breast, 
Two pale eyelids heavily pressed, 
Two pale lips that are closed so fast, — 
And behold, life's labor is done at last 1 
2* 



22 LIFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGHWOTIT. 

In the spring of 1876 he was stricken down with 
a brain disease that threatened to end his usefulness, 
and, at the instance of his friends, he consented to be 
placed under the care of a physician, on whose skill 
reliance was placed to bring the treatment to a suc- 
cessful issue. Under this efficient regime, the result 
was abundantly gratifying, and in a few months the 
patient was restored to his friends, the only cloud 
upon his horizon being the fear that he might not 
be able to resume pastoral work. So passed quickly 
the time until the fifteenth day of April, 1877. 
While sitting at the breakfast- table on that Sun- 
day morning, suddenly he exclaimed, "Now I'll 
throw up my cap and shout, I am a free man ! " 
alluding to the fulfilment of the prescribed time for 
his enforced rest. " I am going to preach ! " He 
was lono'ino- for the battle ; his idleness had become 
irksome. That week he received pressing invita- 
tions to visit his waiting people in Jamestown, and 
ascertain if his new-found strength were sufficient 
to warrant his return to his pastorate. Quickly 
responding to the call, he started within a few hours 
for that place. As he bade adieu to a friend, he 
earnestly said, "If I fail in this effort, — mark ray 
words > — if I find I cannot do my work, I shall not 
live. But it is not death I dread : I dread only a 
useless life." 

With expressions of genuine gratitude to the 
family who had generously tendered to himself and 
wife the hospitalities of their magnificent home for 
a period of ,six months, he bade good by to the 



LIFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGIIWOUT. 23 

place of his earlier, and started for the scene of 
his last labors. Reaching New York the next 
morning, he visited his mother and sister, and 
talked cheerfully and hopefully of the future, 
dwelling with deep feeling upon the fact that he 
had such hosts of friends, saying, "I am proud 
of my true, disinterested friends." Resuming in 
good spirits his journey, he swiftly n eared the 
goal of his desires. Arriving at Jamestown on 
Wednesday evening, he was welcomed by every 
mark of affectionate interest. The remaining three 
days of the week were spent in reunions, very 
grateful to him. 

On Saturday he visited the parsonage which he had 
left a year before in such distressing circumstances, 
and which his friends hoped would soon be made 
alive again by his presence. This visit shook his 
nerves and touched his sensibilities very keenly ; 
but shaking off the temporary agitation, he entered 
the garden, and found in the old spot that had so 
Ions: needed and missed the master's hand a few lit- 
tie flowers, struggling through the tangle of weeds ; 
these he picked, and tenderly placing them in a box, 
sent them to his wife, who was awaiting his return 
in Fall River. 

On Sunday morning, the twenty- second of April, 
one week after the day on which he was going to 
"throw up his cap and shout," he entered the church, 
and stood in his old place before a large audience. 
The sight of so many friends, recalling past associa- 
tions, nearly unmanned him ; but soon forgetting all 



24 LIFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGHWOUT. 

else in the absorbing interest of bis theme, be de- 
livered with intense fervor his last sermon. 

On Monday he complained of having passed a rest- 
less night, and expressed some anxiety in regard to 
himself, but still hoped all would be well in a day or 
two. 

But he continued steadily growing more ill, con- 
stantly reiterating the desire for sleep and rest. " If 
I could sleep, all would be well." As he gave no 
sign of rallying, on Tuesday his son was tele- 
graphed for, who reached Jamestown on Wednesday 
evening. Thursday morning, Mr. Haughwout rallied, 
and his friends took heart of cheer. His son, think- 
ing that a journey might prove beneficial, hastened 
preparations for departure. The carriage which was 
to convey them to the train was waiting at the door. 
Suddenly Mr. Haughwout began rapidly pacing the 
floor, every vestige of color having left his face. 
" If I find I cannot do my work, I shall not live." 
Perhaps this fatal prophecy occurred to him. Turn- 
ing to a young friend, he exclaimed, " I am going 
away for a few days. You won't forget me when I 'm 
gone, will you?" "No, no," the answer came, "I'll 
never forget you." Scarcely were the words uttered 
when she was startled, by a fall, hearing which, his 
son, hurrying to his aid, beheld his father lying out- 
stretched, upon the floor, his hands folded, his eyes 
closed, his heart pulseless forever ; while upon the 
face the Hand which " wipes away all tears from the 
eyes," had left its Divine impress in a smile of inef- 
fable sweetness. 



LTFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGHWOUT. 25 

The longed-for, restful " sleep " had come ! 

After a brief funeral service, his son, accompanied 
by Hon. Jerome Preston, started, with the remains 
of his father, towards the home from which he had 
gone, so full of hope, less than two weeks before. 
He was to " lie, at the last," by the side of his friend, 
Dr. Thurston. The funeral was attended on Sunday, 
April twenty-ninth, in his old church, the First Bap- 
tist Church of Fall River, one week from the day he 
preached in Jamestown. Rev. A. K. P. Small, 
assisted by Rev. H. C. Graves, S. W. Butler, M. 
Burnham, and W. W. Adams, D. D., officiated at 
the funeral. Rev. Mr. Burnham offered prayer, and 
following this Rev. H. C. Graves read appropriate 
selections of Scripture, and added the following 
beautiful original stanzas, suggested by the pitiful 
cry for " rest " : — 

HE BESTS. 

IN MEMORY OF REV. P. B. HAUGHWOUT. 

O Christ, Thou leadest up Thine own 

The way thyself hast trod, 
The shining, glorious, saintly path, 

The king's highway to God. 

We give Thee thanks, O mighty Lord, 

Who didst the victory win! 
With Thee in life Thy servant stands, 

Above all death and sin. 

This side the grave, with patient heart, 

Where darkness lingers yet, 
They wait on Thee who see Thee not; 

Sun of their soul! 'tis set. 



26 LIFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGHWOUT. 

But morning streams across the deep; 

All, all 's beyond the sight. 
There 's life and love, there 's glory still. 

Wait, wait the coming light! 

He rests! God's servant rests to-day; 

Heaven's Sabbath is begun; 
Peace fills the soul when Jesus speaks, 

" Servant of God, well done." 

Rev. A. K. P. Small, successor of the deceased, 
delivered a noble, eloquent tribute to the mem- 
ory of this Christian minister. He spoke as fol- 
lows : — 

"It need not be said in this presence that it is 
no ordinary event which brings us together to-day. 
It is not in response to any church-bell, or in 
observance of mere custom, but because of the 
silent, sacred impulses of many hearts to which I 
know not who can give suitable expression. For 
a special reason, I cannot presume to be a suitable 
organ for the utterance of your real appreciation of 
this public servant of God. 

" Though one may have seen him privately and 
socially, being charmed with his conversation, de- 
lighted with his friendship and gleams of genius and 
erudition, almost as certain to radiate from him any- 
where as heat from a glowing furnace, yet if one has 
never seen him in the pulpit, catching the thrill of 
his presence and his voice, the power from the inces- 
sant outflinging of gems of knowledge and beauty, 
gathered from all departments of nature and revela- 
tion, if one has never felt the welcome, magnetic mas- 



LIFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGHWOUT. 27 

tery of this prince in Israel, when on his own sacred 
throne, you who so many times, spellbound, have lis- 
tened, will assuredly say that one never knew Mr. 
Haughwout. 

"That much-desired privilege was never mine. 
Hopefully have I waited for it, but it can never be. 
I have only seen him as the soldier off duty, in fatigue 
dress, waiting for recuperation. 

" Yet I cannot be persuaded that I do not know 
him. How could a successor live for any time among 
this people and not know him ? Are there anywhere, 
in all this region, strange stones, old bowlders having 
wrapped up in them the mystery of ages ? To which 
one of them could he not sro and read it, through and 
through, telling to the dumb stone its own exact his- 
tory of centuries ago ? Living as I have among this 
people, not dumb, but eloquent through his own inspi- 
ration, must not one be hopelessly dull not to know 
our late pastor ? 

" Well enough have I known him to be prepared 
to repeat the remark of Mr. Sumner when the most 
brilliant senator fell by his side, 'There is a void 
difficult to measure as it will be difficult to fill.' 
Besides his character as a minister of the gospel, it 
is no forced eulogy, but only fact, by all acknowl- 
edged, that his was no common order of intellect or 
measure of literary acquirement. Above what is 
common in ordinary professional life, he was phi- 
lologist and naturalist ; if not technically scientist 



28 LIFE OF PETER BRIXTON HAUGHWOUT. 

and historian, he was a most enthusiastic student in 
these departments. 

"His power of accumulation, amounting to mys- 
tery, was possible to but few. That quickness of 
intuitive discernment, that analytical insight, omni- 
bus memory, literary enthusiasm, — ah ! this indeed, 
for himself and for his friends, really the great 
misfortune, — that intense mental activity, outrun- 
ning, consuming physical power, making him too 
early the victim of disease, that relentless foe, which 
drove him from this, his chosen field, and thus sud- 
denly snatches him from all friends on earth. But 
for disease, which rendered change and rest abso- 
lutely indispensable, how certainly he would never 
have been permitted to leave this pulpit ! Then 
after recuperation, being the pastor of another enthu- 
siastically devoted people as long as strength would 
allow, how singular the Providence, permitting him 
to come and enjoy the hospitality of these friends 
during these last months, then to go, just for a 
parting message, to the other branch of the family, 
his earthly remains coming back to receive the final 
offices of affection from these loving hands ! 

" With astonishing eloquence and power he 
preached last Sunday to a crowded audience, so 
delighted to gather before him again. His own 
inimitable words are needed to give any suitable 
description of that service, especially of its touch- 
ing close. He alluded to the ceremony of an ancient 
order, in which the password for the members of the 



LIFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGHWOUT. 29 

higher degree was given by placing the hand on the 
heart and pronouncing the word 'whole,' then pass- 
ing in on the left side ; while members of the lower 
degree, placing the hand on the right side, pro- 
nounced the word ' half,' passing in on the right 
side. 

"'Before the heavenly portals,'. said Mr. Haugh- 
wont, 'though I may not say "whole," yet say- 
ing " half," and trusting wholly in the blood 
and mercy of Jesus Christ, I hope for glorious 
entrance.' 

" O weary brother, so often fainting and needing 
rest, have the fetters dropped off? Has thy mind, 
in all its unclouded brilliancy, burst out, free to regale 
itself without fatigue in all that it has capacity for? 
Is the whole limitless spiritual domain now the open 
garden for thy luxury? Oh, thank Heaven for the 
victory ! " 

Eev. Mr. Burnham, pastor of the Central Con- 
gregational Church, followed Mr. Small. He re- 
ferred to the deep and strong friendship that existed 
between the deceased and the former pastor of the 
Central Church, who preceded him seven years in his 
departure from earth He spoke only to offer a 
proper tribute to a man whom his people loved. 
" One of the first things I received after coming to 
the Central Church was a copy of Mr. Haughwout's 
splendid tribute to the memory of Dr. Thurston, 
his warm and devoted friend. One of these men 
w T as strong, the other brilliant. I can see their 



30 LIFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGHWOUT. 

influence on the public to-day. They worked side 
by side for their country during the troublous 
years of the Rebellion, and it was fitting, when 
the elder fell, that his younger friend should pro- 
nounce his eulogy ; and I would that I could have 
heard some of that beatiful eloquence as it fell 
from his lips ! I have read his description of 
Christ in Grethsemane, praying and suffering ; and 
another of His resurrection, in which the angels, 
rolling away the stone, touching the dead eyelids, 
which opened amid shoutings of praise and joy 
in heaven, were painted with masterly eloquence. 

"He has now entered that celestial scene, where 
he can enjoy the realities of his former hopes." 

Rev. Dr. Adams, pastor of the First Congrega- 
tional Church, delivered the Inst address. The 
following is but an epitome of his remarks : — 

"My acquaintance with Mr. Haughwout was full 
and pleasant, and when passing through troublous 
experiences myself, I always found sympathy in 
communion with the friend now lying cold and 
silent before us. 

"His study was a place of general knowledge. 
Geology, mineralogy, and chemistry were there 
represented. His aims were broad and limitless ; 
his criticisms on men and politics were searching 
and thorough. I cannot come before you as a 
mourner to-day. He is now in the sphere where 
his longing desires for knowledge can be gratified, 
and where he can range unfettered by weariness 
and disease. We will think of him but gone for 



LIFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGHWOUT. 31 

a little season. There is but a breath between us 
now, and by the grace of God we shall never be 
separated." 

On Sunday, May sixth, the memorial services 
were held in the First Baptist Church, James- 
town, New York. After the- reading of the 
Scriptures and prayer by Prof. Albro, the hymn, 
written by Rev. H. C. Graves, of Fall River, 
was sung, after which the following resolutions 
were read : — 

"Fall River, April 30, 1877. 

" The Fall River Ministerial Association desires to 
express its sympathy with the family of the late Rev. 
P. B. Haughwout, with the First Baptist Church in 
Fall River, and the Baptist Church in Jamestown, 
New York. 

"Some of us knew the brother as an intense and 
tireless student in his profession ; and in all learning 
as an effective, brilliant, and earnest preacher ; as 
a genial, stimulating, and warm-hearted Christian 
friend and fellow- worker. Some of us have known 
him through his works which remain to testify of him, 
through the strong affection cherished for him by all 
who have been in personal fellowship with him, 
through the impress of his character upon his former 
parish in Fall River. 

w We desire to encourage ourselves and all to 
whom he was dear by the freshened sense of the 
grace of God, through which our brother triumph- 
antly endured great trials to the blessed end, by 



32 LIFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGHWOUT. 

the precious hopes with which we may follow him 
in the new life on which he has entered, by the 
increasing sense of the identity of the church above 
and the church below, by the profound conviction 
that in the Lord we are not really sundered from 
our brother. 

" May the Lord graciously manifest his fulness to 
the widow who so long and so faithfully watched 
over and strengthened the husband of her youth ! 

" May He enable the churches of which our 
brother was former pastor to show forth the praises 
of God more fully and gladly, because of the new 
treasure which they have on high, and the human 
affections, which now more than before draw them 
heavenward ! 

"Done by vote of the Association, this thirtieth 
day of April, A. D. 1877. 

"S. Wright Butler, Secretary." 

After the reading of the "Eesolutions," Prof. 
H. S. Albro delivered a brief address, saying: 
"I regard the contact with, and the influence of 
such a man as Mr. Haughwout as among the 
greatest of human blessings. The three years of 
my acquaintance with Mr. Haughwout I regard 
as the most happy years of my life. The first 
time I heard him from the desk, two distinct im- 
pressions were made upon me as I listened. I 
was fed with mental and spiritual food, and at 
the same time I felt an admiration for his won- 
derful intellectual power. The friendship of Mr. 



LIFE OF PETER BRITTON" HAUGHWOUT. 33 

Haughwout was a blessing and a privilege beyond 
the power of language to express. The sweetest 
thing about any friendship is the foot that our 
friend appreciates the little acts of kindness and 
the minor expressions by which we unconsciously 
express our regard. This delicate appreciation Mr. 
Haughwout possessed. There was an intellectual 
stimulus to be derived from an association with 
him that can hardly be too highly rated. His 
knowledge was so broad and so thorough, and 
he was so interested in his studies, that he im- 
parted his enthusiasm to his friends in no small 
measure. Another of his strongly marked charac- 
teristics was his moral heroism. No man who 
knew him ever could believe that he ever stood 
in the pulpit, and did not dare to utter what he 
was convinced was the truth. In private he was 
equally bold and honest in dealing Avith both his 
own faults and the faults of his friends. The main 
secret, perhaps, of his wonderful power was the 
fact that he lived on a higher moral plane than 
most men. He was not tempted by the petty 
jealousies, the mean rivalries, the bad passions 
which come in to mar the lives of other men. His 
inner life, his thoughts, ambitions, hopes, and 
aspirations, were all pure. The best monument 
that can be erected to Mr. Haughwout's memory 
by those whom he so faithfully served is the 
building up in each one of such a Christian char- 
acter as it was his highest and holiest pleasure to 
set forth and commend." 



34 LIFE OF PETER BBITTON HAUGHWOUT. 

At the close of Prof. Albro's remarks, Mr. A. F. 
Jenks delivered a strong, manly, stirring memorial 
address which the brevit}^ of space forbids giving in 
its fulness. He said : — 

"This is no ordinary memorial occasion. The 
man and the circumstances are both peculiar. He 
who pronounces a panegyric upon the life of a 
man, tacitly at least approves of the life he has led 
and the principles he has advocated. How many 
men under such circumstances have been almost 
compelled, indirectly to be sure but really never- 
theless, to pay a tribute to vice, to compliment 
infidelity, or to do homage to ionoranee ! Xo 
such necessity, however, is laid upon an3 r man 
who, with honest and generous heart, seeks to 
pay a tribute to the memory of the late Rev. 
P. B. Haughwout. Your presence here to-day 
is not simply a tribute of respect to the man : 
you came to do honor to the man of genius and 
culture. Xor is it simply the l man of genius and 
culture ' whom you honor. By your presence 
here, whether you will it or not, you pa} r a tribute 
also to religion. For this man was the triple 
product of genius, culture, and religion. It was 
the function of culture to stimulate his genius ; 
but religion performed the threefold office of sav- 
ing the man, directing his genius, and sanctifying 
his learning. A tribute to him is a tribute to 
learning sanctified by religion, and to religion 
glorified by culture. 

"What shall we say of his natural gifts of intellect 



LIFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGHWOUT. 35 

and heart? Let us pause for a moment before that 
animated form whose every look and gesture bore 
evidence of an extraordinary intellect. Let our ears 
catch again the familiar sound of that voice whose 
eloquent utterances ever and anon sparkled with wit, 
scintillated with the oft-repeated flashes of his genius, 
became majestic in argumentation $ flamed with sar- 
casm, or stormed with denunciation. Let us sum- 
mon to our aid the volumes of his sermons, these 
gems of thought, replete with practical wisdom, 
learning, and piety. These shall portray to those 
who knew him the power of his natural gifts, in a 
language more eloquent than words. Those who 
never saw or heard, can never know. For his 
hearers, his pulpit was almost an oracle ; for himself, 
it was a throne. From it he fascinated his audience 
by his eloquence, conquered them by his arguments, 
and swayed them by his appeals. When the dark- 
ness of a stormy night is dispelled by electric light, 
the darkness that ensues is blacker than before. For 
a whole year we had been watching and waiting, and 
praying in the darkness for the return of that light 
toat had guided our course in other and better days, 
when suddenly it came. Like the flash of a meteor 
it burst upon us, and as suddenly disappeared. But 
yesterday it came, to-day it is gone. The sable 
shadows of morning are hovering near, and the night 
is darker than ever ! "How are the mighty fallen in 
the midst of the battle ! " In the very prime of man- 
hood the summons came. His intellect was still 
expanding ; daily contributions were still enriching 



36 LIFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGHWOUT. 

the storehouse of his memory ; the heavy blows of 
Providence had wellnigh chastened away the last 
vestige of pride and selfishness from a soul by 
nature generous, charitable, and kind. Before him 
the whitening harvest of his life lay waiting for his 
sickle ; his soul was aflame with eagerness to gather 
in the golden sheaves. But he has fallen. Who can 
estimate the possibilities of such a life if only it had 
been spared? 

" From whatever standpoint we scrutinize the 
character before us, whatever parts of it come under 
the field of observation, whether we look at it in 
detail or as a whole, Ave are driven forwards to the 
grand conclusion that he aimed at a scholarship 
perfect in thoroughness and accuracy, and broad as 
the realm of truth ; that he aimed to make his learn- 
ing subserve the best interests of mankind, by 
wielding it in defence of the great truths and prin- 
ciples of the Christian faith ; and that he aimed to 
possess and to exhibit before the world those Chris- 
tian and personal virtues which he urged with such 
mighty power upon the attention of others. That 
he succeeded in a remarkable decree in attaining to 
these lofty ideals is the unanimous verdict of all who 
knew him best and are most capable of forming and 
stating an intelligent and impartial opinion. That 
he had his faults, no one w r ould have the arrogance 
to deny; but that he willingly or wilful iy tolerated 
his faults, no one who knew him would for a moment 
admit. If this seems an exaggeration to any of you, 
I will quote from a private letter, written some time 



LIFE OF PETER BRITTON HAUGHWOUT. 37 

ago to a friend of mine in Jamestown : ? I claim to 
know more of the real character and motives and 
inner life of Mr. Hanghwout than any other man 
that belonged to his flock, or lived in Jamestown. 
There never lived a man that I have had the good 
foitune to know, who was purer and nobler in his 
private life, who had a stronger hatred for any- 
thing that is mean or base, or that savored of 
indulgence of any low, vulgar, or beastly passion, 
than he. He had an abhorrence for anything that 
tends to degrade the soul or retard the mind in 
its lofty search for truth.' 

"He was charitable and sympathetic towards his 
fellow-men, and recognized the right of every man 
to hold his own opinions. He hated ruts and 
empty forms and shams. He believed in a religion 
that changed the heart, a religion having sufficient 
power to get to the surface of a man's life, where it 
can be seen. 

" Fellow-members of the Eumathetic Society, as I 
see you seated in a body to-day, and wearing the em- 
blem of mourning, I cannot help thinking that you 
realize, in a large degree, the loss you Lave sustained. 
I cannot help thinking that those simple badges of 
mourning, which meet the eye of the casual observer, 
are significant of a sorrow within that is deep and 
pungent. To the services of your lamented pastor 
and his beloved companion, you owe the existence of 
your organization, and much of that solidity of char- 
acter and steadiness of purpose which have charac- 
terized you in the past. I need not remind you how 



38 LIFE OF PETER RRITTON HAUGHWOUT. 

deeply he loved you : of that you are well assured. 
He called you f Good Disciples.' Be such in your 
lives ! 

"To-day, the man, the scholar, and the saint lives 
with us only in memory. Alas, too true, only in mem- 
ory ! But there may he live ever, inspiring us by the 
power of his great example to that preparation of 
heart and life which shall make us meet to be par- 
takers with him of that life upon which he has trium- 
phantly entered." 



RELIGION DEVELOPS CHARACTER.* 



" As he thinlceth in his heart, so is he." — Prov. xxiii, 7. 

We make no mistakes air^where greater than those 
which we so often make in judging of character. 
And the most common of these is the notion — and 
a mere notion it is — that we are able to take the 
draught and dimensions of a man's character from 
what we see of it. We especially think that know- 
ing a man intimately, in the daily routine of social 
and business transactions with him, must needs fur- 
nish us with all the essential elements for solving the 
problem of his character. That is a mistake. That 
may answer for some men, and it may be utterly 
futile for others. If by character, we mean the 
actual forces and qualities which enter into the com- 
position and texture of a man's personality, of his 
mode of thought, feeling, and action, then we can 
see that whether any one man's life is a complete in- 
dex to his character depends on a score of things 
which must all be ascertained before we can answer 
the question. 

There are few men and women living who fin;- 

* The last sermon of the author, delivered in Jamestown, New 
York, Sunday, April 22, 1877. He died Thursday, April 26, 187, . 



40 RELIGION DEVELOPS CHARACTER. 

their daily life a full expression of the powers and 
qualities that are in them. Why, if we did this, if 
our daily life were an adequate rendering, a luminous 
and satisfying interpretation of our inner self, there 
would be an end to half our cares, ambitions, strug- 
gles. We are all reaching out for larger scope, larger 
means, larger conditions of living. We are not satis- 
fied ; and what is the reason, but that we have in us 
and of us a sense of power, a feeling of inward adjust- 
ments, a consciousness of untried and undeveloped 
forces, which cry for a higher level, for more room, 
for a broader sweep and play of opportunity ? The 
character of a man takes in not only what you see, but 
what you do not see, — a vast fund of mere potentiali- 
ties, that is waiting for a more productive season, but 
which, though waiting, is by no means without a 
silent, suasive, stimulating action on mind and temper. 
A few drops of nitric acid will burn your flesh, 
but you may pour an ounce of it into a pail of water, 
and then safely plunge your fingers into the mixture. 
The acid is there, but you have neutralized it for the 
time. Now for most men their actual life neutralizes 
half the elements of their characters, and the character 
which they show is only the residual quantity of un- 
neutralized self. Take a skilled mechanic, and put 
him to hod-carrying, and no matter how well he does 
his hod-carrying, you would never learn from that 
the talents which he has as a mechanic ; or set an 
accomplished book-keeper to measuring tape and rib- 
bon over a counter, and you at once obscure and sup- 
press his book-keeping faculty. And you can see that 



RELIGION DEVELOPS CHARACTER. 41 

what is specially true here is generally true of the ele- 
ments of character. Life does not exhaust us, it does 
not call out all there is in us ; and it is the misfortune 
of many men that their actual life employs only the 
poorest and worst part of their stock of character. 
How often you have heard the plaintive, almost piti- 
ful response of the rum-seller to the demand that he 
give up his business, the response that he had the 
business entailed on him, and that he would be glad 
to-be rid of it on terms consistent with his daily 
bread. Imagine a man of conscience and of respec- 
table social belongings engaged in that business. He 
is not as bad as his employment, he is not as de- 
graded as his circumstances. He feels and we know 
that his better self is neutralized by his pursuit, and 
that he is capable of a hundred-fold higher level than 
that to which the clutch of some malignant fiend has 
dragged him down. 

One of the kindest-hearted, most generous men I ever 
knew was galled and humiliated by the fact that his 
fortune was locked up in the business of dram-selling. 
His family were every way estimable. His daughter 
I baptized, and she was one of the most faithful of all 
the converts then added to the church. I knew the 
keen sensitiveness of the father to the stigma which 
public opinion affixed to his business, and I knew 
that he was willing to sacrifice half his money for the 
privilege of disentangling himself, but he was not 
willing to give up all, for, as it was, his very wealth 
commanded for his family some consideration ; and 
he told me he knew very well that if he descended to 



42 RELIGION DEVEIOPS CHARACTER. 

poverty for the sake of his conscience, the very men 
who applauded the deed would soon show that they 
had little respect for the poverty it would have entailed 
upon him. So that the man's pride, you see, fought 
on both sides : on one hand it was wounded by the 
conscious ignominy of his employment, and on the 
other hand it struggled against the consequences of 
his renunciation. Now, how are we to judge that 
man's character? Mind, not his business, for there 
is no question as to that, — how did he think in his 
heart, — but his character ? There was a soul crushed 
down below its natural level, a heart yearning for a 
purer air, a mind capable of a nobler round of thought 
and effort, all overmastered, weighted down, and half 
strangled by the sordid investments they wore before 
the world, which distorted their features, black- 
ened their real complexion, and spread the taint of 
meanness over all their belongings. 

Now, there was a case for the solvent power of re- 
ligion. If that could have touched that man's soul, 
he would have been equal to his hard problem. And 
it is just so with the confirmed drunkard. He is judged, 
and he must expect to be judged, by the worst and 
weakest side of his nature. It is his fatality that 
his vice drags down to its 'own level all the materials 
of his character, and saturates them with its own vile 
contagion ; yet generally, often at least, he is a 
man of nobler potence, of greater possibilities, than 
lie in the average man, and his vice is not caused by 
deficiency of materials, but by bad balancing and 
counterpoising ; it is not a mere leak, it is an over- 



RELIGION DEVELOPS CHARACTER. 46 

flow. Unhappy is the man whose sensibility holds 
the long arm of the lever, while the short arm is in 
Ihe feeble palm of his will ! When Vice coaxes 
him, she clothes herself with the very poetry of his 
nature, and charms him with his own eloquence, and 
masks herself with his own good-nature, and walks 
into his heart with the beauty of an angel of light, 
and he does not suspect that she has stolen her dis- 
guise from his own wardrobe, and decked herself with 
the jewels of his own wealth. Take an unhappy in- 
ebriate of this princely caste, and you have the most 
desperate wreck that ever yet waited salvage, and 
there is no power really equal to the problem but that 
of religion. Here, again, is a case for the gospel. 

A young man, the son of one of the leading fami- 
lies in the city of my residence and labors at the time, 
wealthy, travelled, educated, bright, and witty, the 
charm of his social circle and the pride of his friends, 
was in great danger of falling. By accident I discov- 
ered that he was living very fast, while yet the secret 
of his midnight hours was well kept from his family. 
Knowing him well, I spoke a kindly word to him, 
hardly, I confess, hoping that it would do any good ; 
but it did this good, that, about six months after- 
wards, he came to me in confidence, and in great 
distress declared that he should be ruined if some 
power stronger than his own did not save him, and 
he asked me, with tears and pleading eagerness, 
whether I thought religion could save him. That 
was not for me so easy a question as you might think, 
for with all my confidence in the power of religion 



44 RELIGION DEVELOPS CHARACTER. 

to save any man in any circumstances, I doubt 
whether that power can be made available for a man 
who seeks it with only one specific and selfish end in 
view. If we go to Christ crying only, " Master ! 
help me in this one thing," it is too much as if we 
tacitly added, "In all other things I can help my- 
self, and I shall not need Thee." Something to that 
eifect I had, in conscience, to tell the young man. 

At length, God seemed to help him more effectually 
than his best friends, by laying him low in sickness 
almost unto death. Then he was able to seek Christ 
for Christ's own sake ; and when he recovered he 
walked forth a completely new man, with a moral 
energy, a decision of character, a rugged solidity of 
purpose, of which he had never shown a symptom 
before; and the young man who, years ago, was 
trembling on the verge of social and moral ruin, stands 
to-day one of the foremost men in the community. 
That, too, was a case of neutralization. The ocean 
is full of salt, but you do not find it till you take 
means to crystallize it; it has more silver in it, also, 
than there is in the mines of Peru, but we do not see 
it. And in the character of those about us there 
are elements of nobleness and greatness and moral 
worth, which are hidden from all eyes, and are 
unknown even to their possessors, because the} 7 have 
never been condensed, crystallized, and put in the 
setting of visible^ fact by that one force, whatever it 
may be, which alone would seek them out and develop 
them. 

Do you suppose that we have not scores of men 



RELIGION DEVELOPS CHARACTER. 45 

here who, with the requisite training of experience, 
would have risen to as much distinction as any mem- 
ber of the present United States Cabinet? Have we 
not men who could sign their names as well and as 
fast as our Secretary of the Treasury? The trouble 
is, we have so many men who sign their names too 
fast and too often ; (and if we had not men who could 
conduct financial matters with as much skill as Secre- 
tary Richardson, 1 should expect the town to go into 
bankruptcy before twenty-four hours had passed.) 

Now just so much as we see and know depends 
upon the position which a man holds in life. Put 
him in a place which makes a continual draught upon 
his powers, without fairly exhausting them, and you 
will see him grow up to that place, opening out daily 
with a larger expansion to meet the requirements of 
his post. Put him in a place beneath him, and his 
faculties will sink down to it, and you will never know 
how much of a man he really w T as, and had the abil- 
ity to become. 

And now I wish to apply what I have said to the 
moral character especially, and I assert that, without 
the ripening force of religion, no man is more than 
half developed, and most men remain, life-long, with 
the worst side of their character turned out to the 
world. 

There are closets in our nature to which religion 
furnishes us the only key, and if that do not unlock 
them, their stores remain forever unknown. There 
are men here among us who keep but a low place in 
society, and are moral zeroes in the labors and strug- 

3* 



46 RELIGION DEVELOPS CHARACTER. 

gles of the time to better itself, who yet possess, 
without knowing it, a faculty of leadership that would 
make them princes of men, if only the power of 
religion could touch and vitalize their hearts. A man 
does not know himself, as long as the truth of God is 
ignored by him. He is like the poor bushman of 
Australia, who was the heir of one of the great 
estates in England ; but when he was told the truth, 
laughed at it, and w r ent his w T ay, and w^as found, on 
the morrow, sleeping in a litter of straw by the side 
of his own cattle. But when he took in the truth of 
his estate, do you think he was content to sleep in 
the stable and make his bed of straw? It is just so 
with the ennobling power of the truth that we are the 
heirs of God's estate of immortality. Make yo ur 
heirship a tangible fact to your own apprehension, 
let the glory of it descend like the sunbeams and 
crown your life, let the inspiration of it suffuse 
your thought and burn in your deepest conscious- 
ness, and I say to you that you are doing things to- 
day that you w T ould not then be bribed to tolerate, 
and there are dormant elements of manliness in you 
that w r ould awake them to a life larger and nobler 
than }'ou have yet dreamed of living. I often think 
that it might well be that in the scrutiny of the last 
day we should be obliged to undergo such a ques- 
tion as used to be asked in one of those old secret 
societies wdiich so often, like the moles, under-drained 
and subsoiled the surface of Europe. The members 
were of two classes, and they met in two divisions, 
one on the right, and one on the left, of the main 



RELIGION DEVELOPS CHARACTER. 47 

entrance. At the door stood a sentinel or guard, 
and as the members came np to him they quietly 
announced, "A whole," and then they took the 
right ; or they said, " A half," and then they took 
the left. They meant that they were whole and half 
members respectively. And when we come to pass 
in at the great door of God's tribunal, tell me, how 
many of us will dare announce themselves us ivhole, — 
" 1 am a whole man," — and what a host must go in 
with the fearful password on the lips of every one of 
them, " I am half a man" ! The unreligious man is 
but half a man. The better part of him is unknown 
to us or to himself. He finds no use for it, and God 
knows it is of no use to the world. For his own 
sake, for the sake of what influence he has in this 
world, he ought to reclaim the lost half of himself, 
and he will not, he can not find it save under the 
cross of Christ. And are there not men among us 
whose very salvation depends on their finding this 
nobler half of their selfhood ? They are the victims 
of some special weakness, perhaps they are the 
dupes of their own genial nature. Their will-power 
is too feeble to contend with the temptations which 
waylay and beset their steps. They "would do good, 
but evil is present with them" and too potent for 
their powers of resistance. 

If any men need the help of Christ, these are the 
men ; and these are the men who, when they do 
find the better half of themselves, show in it, and 
bring out of it exemplars of beauty and of urgency 
that flash back on us the light of apostolic triumphs. 



48 RELIGION DEVELOPS CHARACTER. 

God will not save us in fractions. He claims the 
whole man, and no power can reach and regenerate 
the whole man, no power can lift us out of the slough 
of our criminal nature, and cleanse us with the refine- 
ments of a nobler culture and crown us with the 
heirship of the dear hereafter, no power can do this 
but the truth as it is in Christ Jesus. 



"In delivering this last discourse, Mr. Haughwout 
said much that was not upon the written page, but 
was suggested to him by the spirit of the hour. 
Those who were present can never forget the deli- 
cate and modest, but yet most feeling reference to 
himself and the past eventful year, or the almost 
prophetic reference to the time when he should stand 
trembling before God's great tribunal." He closed 
the service by reading with thrilling pathos the 
hymn, 

" I love to tell the story of unseen things above," 

placing his hand, with a most impressive gesture, 
upon his heart as he repeated the line, 

" It did so much for me," 

and then, raising his hand above his head in a trans- 
port of ecstasy, 

<k I love to tell the story, the old, old story, 
Of Jesus and his love! " 



THROUGH SUFFERING. 



" Father, I will that they, also, whom Thou hast given me, be with 
me ivhere I am; that they may bdwld my glory, which Thou hast 
given me ; for Thou lovedst me before the foundation of the 
world." — JoHsrxvii, 24. 

The problem of suffering in this world is even 
more perplexing and involves a deeper mystery than 
that of sin. It has been a notion often maintained 
that there is a casual connection between the two, 
between sin and suffering ; but a moment's thought 
teaches us that such a connection holds through only 
a small fragment or segment of the vast world, 
which bends and groans under the empire of pain. 
So universal is suffering, that, even to the eye of 
pagan philosophy, it seemed to assert for itself the 
dignity of a law, and to stand towards the Creator 
in the light and character of a ministry. So far as 
it is the consequence of sin, the result of human 
error or transgression, it was easy to give it rank as 
an agency of the divine justice, and to detect also 
the holy uses it must serve as a corrective, remedial, 
and instructive power of the divine benevolence. 
But the gospel takes a still higher view, and gives to 
suffering a still nobler and diviner character. It 
actually raises it up to the level of an educating 
power ; while admitting its lower purposes and char- 



50 THROUGH SUFFERING. 

acters, it takes it into the system of disciplinary, 
developing, sanctifying ministries, and teaches us to 
treat it with an awful but submissive respect, as we 
would, and do, all the great parts of that mystic but 
demonstrable scheme of providence and of grace by 
which God trains us here for a larger life, and a 
richer and riper world to come. . 

The old monks, you know, seized on this idea of 
suffering as an educating force, and then perverted 
the application of it by the attempt to invent a new 
species of development through purely gratuitous 
sufferings, the self-invoked pangs of hunger and of 
bodily mortifications. God knows we have suffering 
enough without putting ourselves to the trouble of 
creating it ; but those old monks, giving up all the 
cares and duties of an active life, and withdrawing 
from the world into a luxurious dormancy of idleness 
and solitude, would have found no suffering at all, 
not enough to push this theory into practice, if they 
had not now and then laid the whip on their shoulders. 
Their system was an abuse, and a monstrous con- 
fusion of gospel teaching and heathen superstition. 

Not the sufferings we make for ourselves, but those 
which come to us in the allotment of God, not the 
artificial, nor yet the guilty pains which are charge- 
able upon our own folly or sin, but those which we 
cannot help or avoid, and which spring right out of 
our lives as the inevitable products of our toil, our care, 
our daily strife, — these are the sufferings which the 
gospel enriches with its ennobling grace, which the 
Master makes a ministry of education, and of which 



Til COUGH SUFFERING. 51 

the apostle says, "Our light afflictions, which are but 
for a moment, shall work out for us a far more exceed- 
ing and eternal weight of <rlory." And this is the 

© © © «/ 

Christian thought which is shadowed forth in the 
Saviour's prayer. Just reflect a moment. He prays 
that his disciples maybe with him, where he is, that 
they may behold his glory. Now where was Jesus, 
where his disciples were not with him, and where, 
judging from their weakness, their vacillation, their 
timidity, it was extiemely probable they would hang 
back, and decline to follow the Master ? Wherever 
it was, it was where the glory of Jesus was most con- 
spicuously displayed, and where they, if they only 
had the courage and the resolution to stand by him, 
would share that glory and be lighted up with the 
halo of its reflections. We all know where that glory 
shone brightest ; not in the temple, where Jesus con- 
founded the doctors ; not on the Mount of Transfigura- 
tion, where three at least of the disciples witnessed 
the heavenly confirmation ; not on the Mount of Olives, 
where they all followed his triumphal, king-like pro- 
cession into the city : but in that dark vale of Geth- 
semane, and under the shade of the old olive-trees, in 
the hour of the Saviour's deepest agony, when he 
was left alone by them all, and made to them that 
touching appeal for the sympathy of companionship, 
"What, could ye not watch with me one hour?" 
there, and afterwards, through the bitter succession 
of his humiliations, ending on the cross, when his dis- 
ciples all forsook him, or stood gazing at him from 
afar, — those were the places, those were the times, 



52 THROUGH SUFFERING. 

those were the occasions, which the Great Master had 
in his mind when he prayed that his discip'es might 
be with him and see his glory. 

It was, then, the glory born of his sufferings, the 
light from the fiery furnace of his griefs, of which the 
Saviour spoke as if it were the culminating and me- 
ridian splendor of his life and character ; and it was 
this which he wanted his disciples to witness and to 
share with him. 

Right here we may make to ourselves the applica- 
tion of the text, in asking the question how far, as 
men and as disciples, we are able to respond to the 
test from which the twelve shrank. We can stand on 
the heights, but can we go down into the depths? 
We can follow Christ up the hill, but can Ave tread 
in his steps when he leads us into the garden ? We 
are good companions in the toil, but can we stay with 
Jesus when the work is not to strike, but to suffer, 
not to do, but to bear and endure? Tell me how a 
man has used his trials, and I can tell you what sort 
of man he is. Human strength comes out, not under 
the ordinary burdens of life, but when trouble or mis- 
fortune has come rolling down upon us like a stone 
from the hillside, and threatening to knock us over 
the parapet of our steep and narrow path. Christian 
strength comes out, not when the sun shines, and 
daily work is like an unbroken song of joy and con- 
tent, but when the heavens scowl, and the storms 
descend, and there is no music anywhere but what 
the quiet heart can make for itself and in itself. 

Weak men are broken by suffering. Weak Chris- 



THROUGH SUFFERING. 53 

tians lose tone and grow sour by the ferment of 
trouble. The best-seasoned men are those who have 
been kiln-dried by the heats of adversity, and weather- 
beaten on all sides of them. What would you give 
for a pilot who had never carried his ship through a 
tempest, or for a captain who dared not stand by his 
pilot when the wind howled through the rigging, or 
the breakers roared on a lee coast ? What swells the 
census of suicides but the want of that moral fibre 
which is nourished and braced by the grace of suffer- 
ing? Cowards that have basked in the summer sun, 
and that run from the shadow of a passing cloud ; 
imbeciles, who have had the mill ground for them by 
the hands of others, and now cry piteously that they 
can never do their own grinding. Coward or imbecile 
is every man who rushes unbidden out of this world 
because he finds it growing harder, colder, darker 
than before. 

There are processes by which the Almighty sweeps 
away the refuse of humanity, and this may be one of 
them ; but there is a process by which God cleans a 
noble nature, and sifts and filters out of it the baser 
material, and that is by suffering. Even History has 
purified and exalted her great names by the after- 
glow and backward-burning altar-fires of their mis- 
fortunes, their agonies, and their death. 

One day of St. Helena balances forever the tyranny 
of Napoleon. Columbus is greater in his chains than 
on the steps of the Spanish throne. The knife of the 
assassin has left Caesar all his glory, and the bullet 
of Booth has turned Lincoln into a hero and a martyr. 

4 



54 THROUGH SUFFERING. 

Such is the magic that lies in the touch of suffering, 
even when that touch is but on the outside, and the 
effect is in the mind of the beholder. But when the 
touch goes to the heart of the sufferer, and we see 
him taking brightness from his pains, and growing 
better for his sorrows, and holding his heart like a 
cup to catch the heavenly clew that never comes but 
in the dark, then we look upon that transforming 
process by which religion makes her best men, his- 
toiy her saints and apostles, and heaven its minister- 
ing spirits. 

We all fight against pain, we run from any threat 
of trouble or bereavement, we should like to hide 
from our cares and anxieties, we would give half of 
life to cover the other half with a sorrow-proof coat 
of mail ; and yet, you strike out the things we so 
dread, and the greater and the better part of us were 
annihilated. " What," said a lady once to King Louis 
Philippe, — "what part of your life lingers most in 
your memory ? " " Madam," said he, " that part in 
which I suffered most, and it is the best part of all 
my life." 

Just cast your remembrance backward, and see 
what impressions have been made on you by your 
sufferings. Perhaps, if you have borne much, if you 
have known disappointment, bereavement, trial, sick- 
ness, or heart-aches worse than any of these, you 
find certain landmarks in your griefs : there are years 
that are topped with sorrow, like pine-clad hills, there 
are months that streak your memory as with black 
bands, and there are days and hours so accented with 



THEOUGH SUFFERING. 55 

misery that you will recall them when all the rest 
have faded into forgetfulness. And who knows, per- 
haps some of these sorrows have been } r our very 
salvation. You may know that they have been so, you 
may be able to see that they came just in time to turn 
3'our dangerous steps, and pluck you back to honor, 
to peace, to safety. If you are a Christian, you may 
feel that at that time, reluctant though you were, you 
went Avith your Master, and beheld his glory. 

I do not like suffering, and yet I have a firm belief 
that I need what God sends. I have, perhaps, the 
spirit of that poor knight w T ho longed to fight when 
he heard his companions arming for the battle, but 
his duty was the humble one of watching, and 
w^hile he watched, there came a random arrow, and 
gave him a fearful wound. His companions came 
back victorious, and shared the prizes of valor and 
the spoils of war, while he lay groaning on his couch. 
And while he was repining, his master sent him 
this message, " Console thyself, thou hast won an equal 
prize, it is the wound thou bearest ! " Oh ! if I could 
know as much as that, if 1 could feel that my wounds 
would be accepted by my gracious Master as titles to 
a soldier's share in the palms of victory and the re- 
wards of fidelity, I either should not shed so many 
tears, or they would all be turned into a rain of joy. 
Suffering does for us what the knife of the primer 
does for the tree. There are some trees not worth 
pruning, and you pass them by, as God passes by the 
wildings of human nature. You cannot graft in the 
scion of a nobler stock till you have made a cut, and 



56 THROUGH SUFFERING. 

the cut may bleed. Just the same law obtains for 
you. Shrink not from the knife, and look forward 
to the richer and sweeter fruit, which only grafting 
by sorrow and pruning by suffering will enable you 
to bear. 



CHRISTIAN DETERMINATION. 



" For I d'termined not to know anything among you, save Jesus 
Christ and him crucified." — 1 Corinthians ii, 2. 

Nothing demands more courage than to stand forth 
as the original advocate of an unwelcome and gen- 
erally despised idea. It is, I believe, the highest 
stvle of courasre to be able and willing to do this, 
and he is the highest type of manhood who is bold 
and fearless enough to confront the disdain and 
opprobrium which await every one who attempts to 
start the inertia of this self-satisfied world by rolling 
upon it the weight and volume of a new and un- 
acceptable opinion. "They may crush me," said 
Calvin, " but the truth I teach they cannot crush," — a 
noble confidence ; but what an heroic heart beats in 
the bosom of a man who is ready to be crushed for 
the sake of the cause he defends ! 

Such a heart had the apostle Paul, and he, fol- 
lowing the Master, set the example which John Cal- 
vin followed ; for when death frowned upon him, 
when he had already tasted the bitterness of death in 
a thousand perils and a score of persecutions, he 
exclaimed tranquilly, "But none of these things move 
me, neither count I my life dear unto myself." We 
can form now but a poor conception of the self-abne- 



58 CHRISTIAN DETERMINATION. 

gation, the ardor, the sublime daring, of the spirit 
which breathes in the text. It was held at first the 
reproach of the Christians, that they put their faith 
in a dead man, yea, in a crucified malefactor*, that 
they seemed to honor the manger of Bethlehem 
above the silver cradle of a prince, and to cleave to the 
cross of Calvary as if its arms were those of a god. 
And so they did. But what a thing this was to do 
in the face of that supercilious Greek and Roman 
world ! It cut through every sentiment of the dom- 
inant heathenism. It confounded the most current 
opinions and the deepest feelings of the Gentile 
world. It went against flesh and blood, and shocked 
and outraged whole centuries of educated and estab- 
lished thought. This was that offence of the cross 
which the Greeks not only stumbled over, but which 
they ridiculed, jeered at, and utterly scouted. To 
hold up the crucified Jesus as the hope of the race 
was almost a safe thing to do, from its unspeakable 
audacity. Men would open their eyes with aston- 
ishment, and then close them with a smile of pity, 
and say to the preacher, as Agrippa said to Paul, 
'"Thou art beside thyself." John Huss, preaching 
the forgiveness of sins by Jesus, instead of absolution 
by a priest, was nothing to this. Garrison, denoun- 
cing slavery to excited crowds of slave-holding sym- 
pathizers, was only a shadow by starlight of this 
might}' solidity of courage and defiance. 

There is nothing, in church or state, so hard to 
overcome as an unfeeling conservatism, a conserva- 
tism that rests on dead facts, and that retains no 



CHRISTIAN DETERMINATION. 59 

drop of sap, no spark of fire, from the generous 
enthusiasm which gave it life at the start. And 
when Paul preached, he was in presence of the vast 
conservatism of a thousand inanimate years and a 
thousand dead divinities, stored up, like broken 
furniture, in the temples and in the intellect of the 
world. And when I consider what this metallic 
resistance must have been, with what hopeless 
stolidity it must have beaten back any faith but 
that of the apostles, and any power but that of 
Grod, I can but consider the early success of the 
gospel as one of the greatest miracles ever wrought 
in its behalf, — a miracle wholly unparalleled in 
the history of any other religion. But knowing, as 
Paul did, at what precise point the truth came into 
closest contact with the repugnant conservatism of 
the heathen world, and provoked also the most 
violent hostility of the human heart, what would he 
have clone, had he been a weaker man? He would 
have kept that particular point out of the line of col- 
lision. He Avould have put the cross into shadow. 
He would have anticipated that modern confection of 
all human creeds, which rolls out the name of Jesus 
in a flood of names, and leaves it undisiinguishable 
from others save by its brevity and its toneless utter- 
ance. But Paul knew no such weakness. He had 
his infirmities, as he tells us, but they were only 
spots on the goblet, not flaws in the gla?s. His 
grateful heart would have felt itself dishonored for- 
ever by one moment's recreancy to the name of 
Jesus. That name was for him the sign-manual of 



60 CHRISTIAN DETERMINATION. 

redeeming love. The flash that blinded him on his 
way to Damascus, might seem to have burned that 
name upon his heart. " When I am dead," said the 
gallant English king, " take out my heart, and you 
will find ? Fiance ' engraved upon it." But men did 
not wait for Paul to die that they might learn what 
name was written upon his heart. If he is at liberty, 
and rejoicing in the labors of his mission, he calls 
himself the apostle of Jesus. If he is in prison, 
loaded with chains, he takes his style and writes, 
"Paul, the prisoner of the Lord Jesus." We can 
say, in happj 7- times, " We are the disciples of Jesus" ; 
but when trouble smites us and suffering grinds us, 
how hard it is sometimes to sign ourselves, with 
undiminished confidence, " The afflicted of the Lord 
Jesus ! " But everywhere and always Paul was the 
Lord Jesus' ; and whether lying half dead by the 
roadside or towering like an acknowledged Jupiter, 
in the massiveness of that power which swayed the 
multitudes of Lystra ; wdiether standing on Mars' 
Hill, or immured in the dark hole of the Mamertine 
prison, out of his abounding love, in the intensity of 
his earnestness, he could have sung the strain of the 
Psalmist, only w 7 ith a loftier pitch than David : "Let 
my right hand forget her cunning, and let my tongue 
cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I forget thee, O 
my Master, if I prize not thy name above my chief 

joy !" 

But I ask you to look at the text : you will observe 
a sort of climax in it. Let us remember that it was 
the cross w T hich rendered the name of Jesus so odious 



CHRISTIAN DETERMINATION. 61 

to the wise of this world ; that it was not Christ the 
teacher, but Christ the sufferer, not Christ living, but 
Christ crucified, that taxed the pride and excited the 
scoffs of men, and then we can feel the peculiar dash 
of energetic decision with which Paul exclaims, "I 
determined to know nothing among you but Christ, 
and him crucified." It is tantamount to saying, I 
knew well what made my doctrine so unpalatable to 
the Greeks, and I knew that some of you would have 
desired me to say less of that ungracious cross. You 
would have been pleased to have me compromise, by 
suppressing the hard story of a dying Redeemer ; but 
I resolved not to compromise. I resolved not only 
to preach the wonder-working Jesus, but the suffer- 
ing Jesus. I loved the whole theme, from Bethle- 
hem to Calvary, and I believed the end of that match- 
less life more s:lorious than the bef>innin2f. And I 
determined to keep back nothing, to soften nothing, 
to know nothing but Christ, and that Christ crucified. 
If there is any shame in the cross, I will crown myself 
with that shame. If there is any scandal in it, let 
that Power remove it which took it out of my way, 
and brought me to look in sorrow upon Him whom I 
had pierced. But for that cross we had not been 
redeemed ; and while I live I shall stand by that 
cross, and I shall point to Jesus, hanging and bleed- 
ing on that cross, and I shall say, If He had not loved 
us, He had not died there and thus ; and if He had 
not died, we had not lived. " Behold the Lamb of 
God, that taketh away the sins of the world ! " 

Let me now ask your attention to the limitation of 
3 



62 CHRISTIAN DETERMINATION. • 

the apostle 's theme, which seems to be imposed by 
the words of the text, "Nothing but (not anything 
save) Christ and him crucified." Is this only a ver- 
bal limitation? Is it only apparent, and due merely 
to the highly relieved form, the alto relievo, in which 
the sentence is cast? Js this only a rhetorical ex- 
travagance of expression, or did the apostle mean 
it, in the amplitude of its exclusiveness and in the 
density of its concentration? 1 believe he meant it, 
in every word and accent. .Remember what he had 
been accustomed to preach, when he was living after 
the straitest sect of the Pharisees. Remember what 
his education had been, not in Hebrew learning alone, 
but in the arts and philosophy of Greece. Remem- 
ber what ambitions he had laid on the altar of his con- 
secration to Christ. Above all, remember what he 
was, by natural endowment, by his mighty intellect, 
by his impressive eloquence, weak though he calls it. 
Call all this to mind, and you will see into what a host 
of digressions, into what a multitude of by-themes, 
flowery fields of poetry; thorny lanes of speculation, 
enchanting vistas of taste and ingenuity, Paul might 
easily have been tempted. But all these he excluded, 
and deliberately shut himself up to that one subject 
which had taken possession of him. On that he con- 
verged all the magnificent logic and the constructive 
force of his gigantic mind ; on that he poured in 
blazes of splendor the illumination of his knowledge 
and his art. Every second blow fell just where the 
first had fallen ; every shaft entered where the pre- 
vious one had made a dent in the target. He holds his 



CHRISTIAN DETERMINATION. 63 

hand toward the cross till }'ou can fairly see on it, 
imprinted as in letters of phosphorus, "Christ and 
him crucified." He bathes that name with his tears, 
he weds that name to his lips, he melts that name into 
his preaching, till, like molten ore flowing from the 
furnace, it shoots forth a thousand glowing threads, 
and interweaves its golden tissues with the whole fab- 
ric of his thought and speech. 

And what was the power by which he was able to 
do this ? You know what we say of the man of one 
idea. But if the man of one idea have nothing but 
his intellect to aid him, he will only succeed in plant- 
ing his idea, not in the souls of men, but in the pil- 
lory of social irony, disgust, and ridicule. There is 
power in this unification of thought, but it depends 
on the character and value of the thought itself. 
There is tremendous power in the self-radiating dif- 
fusiveness of a life devoted to one idea, but it is 
the power of heat, not of light ; the power of that 
chemistry which transmutes every element that enters 
the mind or the heart, and works over every circum- 
stance into the shape and pressure of the one dom- 
inant thought. It is the genius of love, not of learn- 
ing ; the spark of zeal, not the torch of science ; and 
as there is no love in this world like a personal love, 
and no faith like a faith fed by daily, gushing sym- 
pathies, so there is no power among men equal to 
the single-hearted earnestness of a disciple of Jesus ; 
and when you put this power behind that vast idea 
which lies in the name of the world's Redeemer, 
I care not who the man may be, Moody from his 



61 CHRISTIAN DETERMINATION. 

store, Spurgeou from his studies, or Richard Weaver 
from his coal-pit, you have an energy that beats on 
the hearts of men with the swell and ponderous effect- 
iveness of a storm wave on the ocean ; nothing can 
resist it. Then a man does not stand before you hold- 
ing up his idea at arm's length for you to look at ; 
but the man and his idea are one, and each is misjkt- 
ier by the union. Then a man does not preach Christ 
as if he were eulogizing the dead, and glorifying a 
sainted memory; but you feel Christ in his words, 
you see Christ in his character, and you carry away 
the conviction that Christ himself has been preaching 
to you. Oh, that we could have this style of preach- 
ing once more in our pulpits and our churches ! an 
oblivion of self, wrought by love, a remembrance of 
Jesus fired by zeal, and accumulating warmth and 
vigor with every day's experience, till we also could 
" determine to know nothing but Christ and him cru- 
cified." 

I have spoken of the limitation which the text im- 
poses upon the theme of apostolic preaching, and 
now I ask you to consider the real expansion of that 
theme which is given by the text. The apostle says, 
" Nothing but Christ,"' but that was almost equiva- 
lent to saying, " Everything in Christ." We must 
not take that narrow view of the text which is too 
frequently taken by many well-meaning Christians, 
that view which seems to look upon any presentation 
of the truth which does not confine itself to element- 
ary principles, as a failure to present the saving truth 
of the gospel. 



CHRISTIAN DETERMINATION. 65 

I think here of what a leading English statesman 
once said. He was discussing the Reform Bill in the 
House of Commons, and he went on to talk of the in- 
fluence which a sense of political responsibility exerts 
upon the humblest citizen, and, diverging somewhat, 
discussed the Irish question, when he was called to 
order. He replied, " Mr. Speaker, there may be men 
here who do not know that every radius of a circle 
points to the centre, and if there are, I will soon con- 
vince them that this radius points to the very centre 
and heart of the subject now before us," and he did. 

Now we have good brethren who seem to have 
the same difficulty in understanding that every radius 
of truth points toward Christ, and that, when the 
apostle said, "nothing but Christ," he did not mean, 
" nothing but the name of Christ," but nothing that 
does not lead, or, rather let me say, everything that 
does lead to Christ. Do you believe the Book of 
Esther does not preach the government and loving 
providence of Gocl, because the name of God is not 
once found in it? Do you believe Paul was not 
preaching Christ before Festus, because he reasoned 
of " temperance, righteousness, and the judgment to 
come " ? Do you think Jesus was not preaching the 
great doctrine of salvation when he uttered what are 
known as the Beatitudes, or that Paul was preach- 
ing anything but Christ when he spake on Areopagus, 
because he did not mention the very name of Jesus 
in that memorable discourse? I tell you, my breth- 
ren, that the preaching of Christ is restricted within 
no straitlaced dogmatism, though it be thoroughly 



G») CHRISTIAN DETERMINATION. 

evangelical, and that it is not made up of pharisaic 
repetitions, though eveiy other note be sounded with 
the name of Jesus. 

He imitates Paul who seeks, as Paul did, to save 
men by any feasible means, and who, like Paul, now 
with argument, now with persuasion, then with ear- 
nest rebuke, and then with loving entreaties, per- 
suades men to believe in the only name by which 
they can be saved. Said Baron Bunsen, — I give, not 
his words, but the sense of them, — " There is no name 
like that of Jesus, but if any other name will prove a 
stepping-stone, by which any man can mount to faith 
in Christ, I would not hesitate to commend that 
name." And is not this the very policy of an earnest 
love of Jesus? Cried Paul, "I become all things to 
all men, if by some means I may gain some." It is 
the very spirit of an earnest disciple, the most self- 
adaptive spirit man has ever known. When a man 
is in earnest, what does he care for the old set forms 
and the old ruts and grooves of routine and custom ? 
If he leave them, men may call him eccentric, his 
brethren may disfraternize him ; but if he can only 
accomplish his object, he will triumph, and all the 
zest of his triumph will be found in the thought that he 
exalted the name and the cross of Christ. 

And now, even more than in the days of Paul, 
" Christ and him crucified " is the theme which hushes 
into silence every strife of theories, every war of 
words, and every jar of interests. On that blessed 
name of Jesus, the hearts of men hang as they never 
hung before. This is my conviction, and I would to 



CHRISTIAN DETERMINATION. ()7 

God, I and you, my brethren, might act upon it! 
Oh, for the strength to do it, as we have, I doubt 
not, the spirit to do it ! Immortality is suspended 
upon that name of Jesus. Do you believe men 
forget this fact? No ! at the last, they will all say, as 
President Buchanan said in his last moments, " I 
have had the conviction, growing with every added 
year of my life, that Jesus Christ is the only hope 
of men, and I humbly seek him, and put my trust in 
his atoning blood." And I ask you whether there 
is, for an earnest disciple, a more expansive theme 
than that of "Nothing but Christ." Christ is every- 
thing for such a disciple ; business or recreation, toil 
or pleasure, joy or grief, all preach of the name 
he loves, and by his love for Jesus he will make 
eveiything preach of Jesus. Oh, my brethren, this 
is no restricted theme ! It compels you to face 
everywhere ; like the soldier at Agincourt, you can 
say, " While I stand, I face the enemies of my king, 
and when I fall, you will find that I fall with my 
face toward home." Take Christ intimately into 
your hearts, and you then make every pulse throb 
w r ith love of Jesus and you make every action a 
sermon of the name you love. If you determine to 
know nothing but Christ, you will know all things, 
and you will tolerate nothing in your lives which 
does not bear the seal and impress of that name 
" which is above every name," to which be praise and 
glory forever ! 



DEAD FLIES. 



'■'Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a 
stinking savor." — Ecclesiastes x, 1. 

There is no other book in existence which utters 
so deep a bass note of heavy, gloomy recollections as 
this book of the "Preacher," and there is no other, out- 
side of the New Testament, which strikes, with so broad 
and solemn a sweep of the hand, all the strings of our 
common humanity. It is the wail of a broken heart. 
It is the long-drawn sigh of exhausted pleasure, the 
nausea of indulgence, the disgust of satiety. It is 
the cry of a great soul, wrung with an anguish which, 
repentance itself made sharper, as an old wound does 
the knife of the surgeon. We seem to see Solomon, 
heaped with his crimes and smarting with the sting of 
his follies, sitting, solitary and desolate, in the cold 
splendor of his throne and his palace. Age has come 
upon him, and death waits at the door. The fire of 
his passions has burnt itself to ashes, and his blood 
has cooled till every pulse is a shiver at his heart. He 
remembers what he was, when, in the morning of his 
life, he rose from his dream, and presented himself be- 
fore God to ask for wisdom. He recalls the magnifi- 
cence of his earlier reign, the grandeur of his state, 



DEAD FLIES. H9 

and the fume of his policy, his deeds, and his pros- 
perity. He remembers his enthusiasm in the service 
of God, what proud hopes swelled within him, what 
triumphs of joy revelled in his heart, when he stood 
by the altar of the temple, and saw his work crowned 
with the glory of the Shekinah, and spread forth his 
hands to invoke, in immortal words, the perpetual 
presence of God with himself and the people. Was he 
in a trance then, or is he in a trance now? What are 
these stocks and stones, these curved images of Baal, 
these idols of the heathen, that thrust their grisly 
faces between him and the God of his fathers? What 
are these lurid flames, lighting up the sky from the 
high places around Jerusalem? What means that 
motley crew of strange priests, with their idolatrous 
symbols and their inhuman rites and ceremonies? 
Y\ 'hat means this tingling shame at the mention of 
Egypt and of Pharaoh's daughter? What is this 
blurred vision of licentious mirth, days of feasting 
and nights of unhallowed sensuality ? Why does he 
start at the shadows on the wall, as if he dreaded an 
avenger from his fo;saken God? Why does the 
thought of dying turn every curtain into a pall, and 
shroud him in darkness, till his eyes strain to catch 
assurance from some straggling sunbeam ? Is this the 
mockery of wine, or is it the "fearful looking for of 
judgment "? 

And now, while plotters are undermining his throne, 

and his own heirs longing for his death, with this 

crushing load upon his spirit, wearied of life, wrapped 

round with the sackcloth of abasing memories, he 

3* 



70 DEAD FLIES. 

takes up the record of his godless years, and with 
indelible and blackest ink he writes across it, " Van- 
ity of vanities, all is vanity." 

Out of the depths of this sad experience what 
voices of teaching and of warning break forth ! He 
had heaped up gold like the sand of the sea, he had 
drawn from India and from Africa their choicest 
treasures ; and with the wealth of kingdoms in his 
hands, he exclaims, " He that loveth silver shall not be 
satisfied with silver, nor he that loveth abundance 
with increase." He had srone throuo'h life with cour- 
tiers for his footstool, flattery for his air, and luxury 
for his pillow. His nod had been laAV to submissive 
thousands, and his pleasure had been perfumed with 
all the sweets of gracious compliance, and yet he ex- 
claims, " One man among a thousand have I found, 
but a woman among a thousand have I not found." 
Must not his eyes have been blind not to have made 
that discovery? Or had all around him followed the 
example of their sovereign, and thrown off manhood 
and womanhood when he threw off the fear of 
God? 

The words of the text might seem to have been 
wrung from the lips of Solomon by a bitter sense of 
his own miserable apostasy. 

No man had ever gained a higer repute for wis- 
dom than he, no man had ever covered himself with 
more honor ; yet now, in the dark and drear ex- 
perience of his closing days, sitting on the ash-henp 
of repentance, and beating his breast in cruel and 
almost sardonic mockery of the state he had kept, and 



DEAD FLIES. 71 

the splendors in which he had lived, he can see plainly 
and feel keenly the one drop of poison which has 
turned his cup of life into vanity, the plague-spot 
which has spread its vile contagion through all his 
wisdom, and cankered his honor and his greatness. 

It is true, he speaks only of a few dead flies in the 
ointment of the apothecary, whereas his corruption 
had been as the carcass of an elephant in a garden 
of spices. He speaks of a little folly, when his folly 
had attained monstrous proportions, and grown rank 
with a luxuriousness of heaven-defying wickedness. 
But I apprehend Solomon, in his gloomy brooding, 
would do as almost every great criminal does when 
he sits behind the grating of a prison, and in the 
shadow of a felon's doom, and lets his thought have 
free play among the events and scenes of his past 
life. He skips over his last great crime ; he is too 
benumbed in conscience to feel the enormity of his 
offence. But he knows what he was, and what he is, 
and he does not stop to measure the great follies 
which have completed his degradation, but he goes 
back to the little follies that first turned him aside 
from the path of tiuth and honor; he sees the fatal 
point at which, by some small sin, he broke through 
the hedge, and rushed into the pathway of ruin, 
and it is upon this small sin, it is on these little fol- 
lies, that he charges all the accumulated guilt and 
wretchedness of his career. And so Solomon might 
pass over the later and more aggravated vices of his 
career, and fasten his regard, with a stinging self- 
consciousness, upon that one dead fly which dropped 
into his ointment when he yielded to the fascinations 



72 DEAD FLIES. 

of Pharaoh's daughter, and opened his heart to the 
wiles of Egyptian cunning, and the seductions of 
Egyptian idolatry. 

That was the fly whose gilded and 'burnished 
wings had charmed him, and that was the fly whose 
ephemeral beauty, touched by the foul finger of 
decay, had spoiled his perfume, and made the savor 
of his reputation hateful to God and to man. 

The first thing we observe, in trying to bring out 
the force of the moral maxim in the text, is, that 
the flies are not only small in themselves, but they fill 
a very small space in the box of perfume ; and that it 
is precisely so with those pestilent vices and follies 
which give a noxious savor to the characters of men. 
They are often so small as to escape detection. 
They are sometimes wrapped up so entirely in one 
or two prominent virtues, buried so deep in the oint- 
ment, that only the closest familiarity is able to 
detect their existence ; yet there they lie, a source of 
corruption in the heart of sweetness, a grain of 
arsenic in a mixture of myrrh. We have a sensibil- 
ity to the savor of character, which is as keen, in its 
way, as the scent of the nostrils. There is a deli- 
cate moral perfume which transpires through a man's 
looks and speech and actions, which spreads on the 
air, and conveys to all around him the odor of fra- 
grant gums and spices, or the smell of dead flies. 
And it is a singular fact that the evil in character is 
more pronounced than the good ; it has a more pene- 
trating and diffusive pungency ; it saturates a man's 
morals and pervades his religion more swiftly and 
thoroughly, so that, though it may take years to find 



DEAD FLIES. 73 

out all the in-eat jroocl there is in a character, we are 
|3retty sure to discover the bad in it the first time we 
set it up where the winds of heaven can blow over it. 
There are men we can never trust, because of this 
almost indefinable and yet decisive perfume of their 
character. We feel sure there is unsoundness in 
them, yet we cannot point it out. We feel as the old 
knight felt, when he was about rushing into the lists 
of the tournament, and took into his hand the lance 
that was given him. He lifted it, and brandished it 
once or twice, and exclaimed that it was not worthy 
to be trusted with his honor. But there was no flaw in 
steel or shaft, and yet at the first blow it broke like a 
rush, and right in the heart of the wood was discov- 
ered the burrow of a worm. We have that feeling 
respecting some men. We can see no flaw in them, 
yet we are convinced they are not sound ; and very 
often, when a hard blow breaks them, and lays them 
open, the secret is revealed, and the burrow of a 
worm is found in their hearts. And so unerring is 
that instinct of the moral sense which warns us of 
the dead flies in human character, that it seems 
strange any man should hope to conceal from others 
the little nest which he has filled with corruption. 
There are those who would sink with shame if they 
suspected that they carried about with them the odor 
of their follies. They would hide themselves from 
the light if they could only know how general and how 
offensive is the savor of the reputation they have 
made for themselves. They share the infatuation 
of the drunken reveller, who goes home from his 



74 DEAD FLIES. 

nightly orgies smiling with the placid assurance that 
there is no taint in his presence, and no trace of ca- 
rousal for wife or child to weep at. 

Vain and besotted delusion ! There are things 
fur which God wants no detective, follies that leave 
an evidence deep as that of a branding-iron, and vices 
that so scarify a man's moral nature that even the grace 
of God cannot efface the deformity, or bring back the 
wholesome fragrance of innocence. How much pit- 
iable weakness and sorrowful regret in the hearts of 
those who once indulged such follies, and gave way 
to such vices, now proclaim and prolong the infec- 
tion of dead flies, and confirm the fearful truth 
that, though repentance and God's compassion may 
wipe out the sin, the effects of the sin linger in 
body and soul, and all the sweet air of heaven can- 
not cleanse the deadly atmosphere of their presence 
till "this mortal shall have put on immortality." 

And let me observe that the flies are apt to get into 
the ointment while it is being made. They are at- 
tracted by the flavor of honey. They are drawn to 
the apothecary's mortar by the inviting smell of his 
balsams and essences. They buzz around his head 
and flit under his hand, till at last they are caught by 
the descending pestle, and crushed into the ointment. 

It is just so with the dead flies in character. The 
time of clanger is when the elements are entering into 
combination, when character is mixing up its ingre- 
dients, and getting ready to solidify itself for life, 
and that time is in the days of its youth. No old 
man is ever tempted to make perfume of dead butter- 



DEAD FLIES. 75 

flies. No man whose sense and conscience have 
been schooled by experience, is likely to be cheated 
into the small follies of youthful appetite and pas- 
sion. There are few soldiers in the great army of 
wrong-doers who were not recruited when they were 
young. The janizaries of Satan, like the janiza- 
ries of the old Turks, are trained up from their youth. 
The temptations of the young man are like the fires 
of Moloch ; it is folly to think he can dally with them, 
and then come out without being scorched. And yet 
w 7 e know there are young men among us who are 
playing with the tempter, and binding her charms 
recklessly about their necks, who would be terrified 
if they believed they could never rid themselves of 
the spell she has put upon them. There are young 
men who give themselves up to the insinuating and 
captivating pastimes of evil companionship, who 
join in the ribald jokes and the bacchanal songs, and 
the vulgar amusements of men whose names they 
know w T ould disgrace the signatures of their fathers 
on the same paper, young men who rush into ex- 
cesses at night which they blush to remember by 
day, and cultivate a nocturnal society whose known 
partnership would blast what little good fame they 
have. There are young men among us who are doing 
all this without a thought that they are contracting a 
vile slime of manners and sentiments which will stick 
to them like mastic on a stone wall. They at least 
have no faith in the apostolic apothegm, "Evil com- 
munications corrupt good manners." They are per- 
fuming their reputations with dead flies, they are 



76 DEAD FLIES. 

steeping their lives in the exhalations of vice ; their 
characters begin to smell rank with the miasm of 
vicious associations ; and yet, even though they may 
sometimes be rudely admonished that they are falling 
into bad odor, they hope by and by to sprinkle them- 
selves with disinfectants, to purify the ointment with 
a little chloride of lime, and neutralize the dead flies 
in their character with the potash of respectability. 
But, I repeat, it would take a miracle to do this. 
Not more surely are the sins of the fathers visited on 
the heads of their children, than the follies of youth 
are innoculated into all the tissues of character ; and 
the weak sp^ts of many a man, now standing clean 
and unsoiled among his fellows, are just the places 
where the follies of his youth have gangrened, and 
the dead flies lie festering in the ointment. It is not 
always the feeling of innocent sadness, it is sometimes 
the feeling of a guilty remorse, the sense of what we 
lost, and madly lost, in the follies of our younger 
days, that makes us say, — 

" I would I could recall those days 
When I was a free, laughing bo}^; 
When every note was one of praise, 
And every impulse one of joy! " 

We learn to sins: this when we find that the abuse 
of 3 T outh has taken from us what we never can 
recover, that it has turned the boyish note of praise 
into a long sigh that quavers with repentance, and 
the impulse of joy into the cracked string of a harp 
that has forgotten its music. I do not mean that 



DEAD FLIES. 77 

religion has not power to redeem a wasted youth, or 
that it does not provide a large compensation for the 
joys and exultant energies which youthful follies 
have deadened forever. But I say this, that God 
meant religion to be something more than a compen- 
sation ; and that if a young man waste and corrupt 
half the material of his manhood, all the religion God 
can give him will never make him more than half the 
man he might have been. 

And I ask you to observe how the same consider- 
ations apply to the formation of Christian character. 
There is a time when that is young, and as impressi- 
ble and ductile as hot iron on the anvil. The Chris- 
tian man will be what the convert grows into. What- 
ever mould he throws himself into, he will harden 
to, and after a few years you will have to break him 
into pieces, and melt him over, before you can turn 
him into any other shape. Christian character is 
not a mathematical line, stretching from point to 
point, but an outline, which, with God's help, we are 
required to fill up ; it is the measure and stature of 
a " perfect man in Christ Jesus," with every organ 
complete and in full play. Yet you see in the church 
characters as maimed as men who have no eyes, no 
hands, or no feet. There are large-headed men with 
small hearts, and great-hearted men with no arms ; 
burly-looking men without tongues, and loud-tongued 
men with no digestion. We seem satisfied to culti- 
vate one or two organs, and to consign the others to 
spiritual atrophy and starvation. We are content to 
get a tolerable perfume from our ointment, and do 



78 DEAD FLIES. 

not mind a few straggling flies ; and in the best and 
clearest savor of many a good Christian character 
there is often perceptible a very strong suspicion of 
dead flies, and all its real sweetness is smothered, 
and its power nullified, by the obtrusive presence of 
some little weakness. There are those whom we can- 
not fail to believe good Christians on the whole, but 
whom we would not like to subject to an analytical 
dissection, for we know the}' could not bear it. Yet 
it is the truth that though God may take a man as a 
whole, the world insists on taking him in parts. God 
knows men altogether, as units : we know them only 
in fractions. We cannot always tell on what gen- 
eral plan a character is built up, because we can see 
it only in one section at a time ; and therefore a 
half-educated and faulty Christian may be the object 
of as many different judgments as he shows to men 
different aspects of his life. 

His character may have three or four stories, and 
he may serve the Avorld on the ground floor, and rule 
his household in the upper chambers, while to wor- 
ship God and serve his Master he goes up into the 
attic. In this way his life is so divided, and his 
character exhibited in such shifting lights and frag- 
mentary parts, that while the church holds him for a 
true saint, his family may fear him as a despot, and 
the world point at him as a tricky, money-making 
son of Belial. 

We put great stress on the large virtues. We 
call for faith, temperance, and charity. We touch 
up into brightness the boss of the shield, while the 



DEAD FLIES. 79 

rim is eaten with rust. We take great pains with the 
cardinal points of character, while those smaller 
elements of a pure Christian life, those virtues which 
Paul so loved to inculcate, — meekness, long-suffering, 
gentleness, patience, kindly affection, — these are left 
to struggle as they may ; and our petty weakness at 
these points disables us when we are strongest, and 
provokes scepticism where we are most sincere and 
earnest. 

A man may have a great deal of grace, and be 
blessed with very few graces. He may have a good 
heart with a very wry face. He may preach well to 
sinners, and walk by them on the street without 
a sign of recognition. He may have a most persua- 
sive tongue and a most disobliging temper, a most 
magnificent generosity in giving, and a most grasp- 
ing greed in taking. He may be full of warm sym- 
pathies, and yet freeze them before they reach his 
lips or trickle down to his fingers. He may build a 
church, and yet refuse a dollar to some public char- 
ity ; or he may found a hospital, and tear a church 
into pieces. These are some of the oppositions of 
character, these are the defects in filling up the out- 
line of the Christian man, these are some of the speci- 
mens of a mutilated virtue, these are a few of the 
dead flies in the ointment, that destroy the influence 
of many a life and take away the sweet savor of many 
a reputation. 

And do not let us forget how the flies sret into the 
ointment. They clo not fall into it in swarms. They 
do not plunge into the mortar with a rush of wings, 



80 DEAD FLIES. 

and dive down into the ointment by files and compa- 
nies. They fall into it one by one ; and the apotheca- 
ry, as he sits over his unguent, crushing one fly after 
another, may keep saying to himself, "It is only a 
little thing, it is only one fly more, the perfume is as 
strong and clean as ever"; but when, after a few 
days, he takes down his box of ointment, it is no 
longer the aroma of myrrh and frankincense that 
gives character to the mass, but the loathsome smell 
of the neglected flies. 

That is the history, that is the chronology, of a 
faulty and vicious character. The young man takes 
in one vice at a time, and he generally asks, "Is it 
not a little one?" The Christian tolerates one little 
weakness, till he is not ashamed or aft aid to let 
another and another drop down by the side of it. 
Our faults have such a logical cohesion, they are so 
sure to follow in succession, and pile themselves up 
in such a conglomerate consistence, that it is im- 
possible to cherish one and hate all the rest ; it is 
impossible to admit one, and shut the door against all 
the others. And no man is safe who does not fight 
them all. No young man is safe who tampers with 
temptation in the hope of outwitting it, or keeping 
it at bay. No Christian is safe who lives in the con- 
scious neglect of a single one of his known duties. 
No one is safe, no one can keep a pure character 
and an undefilecl reputation, who does not rid the 
ointment of every fly that falls into it. 

All our life is a struggle with the dead flies. 
There are dead flies in society, that make sick the 



DEAD FLIES. 81 

very air wo breathe ; that cany moral disease into 
every neighborhood they infest, and make it almost 
an experiment of life and death to put the innocence 
of youth where their pestiferous influence can reach 
it. There are dead flies in the state, in the halls 
of legislation, in the courts of justice ; and hardly a 
month passes, hardly a law is enacted, but some reck- 
less apothecary's pestle, some corrupt hand of power 
crushes a fly into the ointment intended to heal the 
wjunds of the body politic. There are dead flies in 
the church, men of unsavory reputation, who tax all 
the charity of the church to its utmost strain, and 
then bring down upon it the scorn and contempt of 
infidels ; idle men and women, who lend no perfume 
to their profession, and take half the perfume out of 
the profession of others. 

And for all these dead flies there is but one rule 
applicable, and I pray God we may have the grace 
and the energy to apply it with vigor : Take out the 
dead flies, one by one, get rid of them before they cor- 
rupt the ointment. Throw them away, and leave God 
to find some use for them, where they can turn back 
into their native dust without sending a plague down 
every wind. 



THE OPEN DOOR. 



"J am the door" — John x, 9. 

It is a fact of curious interest, that while in heathen 
lands, and under the grinding pressure of idolatrous 
systems, men believe that their salvation is a work of 
vigorous pains and life-long difficulties, here, where 
life is strown with the germs of Christian immortal- 
ity, men seem to consider that but little effort is 
required to lift the soul from the clods to the clouds, 
and from earth to heaven. The gospel is so free that 
we hold it cheaply ; it asks so little of us in return for 
the immense boon it bestows, it seems so anxious to 
persuade us, and so ready to save us, that we almost 
fancy it will save us, in some way or other, whether 
we exert ourselves or not. If the way to heaven had 
been a royal road, paved with gold and silver, walled 
in with partiality and exclusiveness, and opening with 
a toll-gate, not to be entered without an enormous 
tax, no doubt there are hundreds who would have 
struggled to gain admittance, while now they sit care- 
lessly, expecting to be carried to heaven on "flowery 
beds of ease." The grandest spectacle this world has 
to offer is one which not a score of persons in a thou- 
sand put themselves to the trouble of looking at once 



THE OPEN DOOR. 83 

a year ; and yet it is the cheapest sight eye can gaze at. 
It costs nothing ; on the contrary, it pays yon what 
money cannot buy, — beauty, magnificence, power, 
— before which millions, in the old time, prostrated 
themselves, and at which the highest art of the 
painter tries itself with despairing aim. Let some 
great artist paint a sunrise, and we will rush to see 
it, and gladly pay our money for the poor imitation 
in oil, while we hardly care to look at the reality 
itself, at the cost of awaking and ^oinsjto the Avindow. 
Now men treat the gospel just in this way. It is not 
that they do not desire salvation, it is not that they 
wish or mean to slight the Divine mercy, but that sal- 
vation is so free, that mercy is so abundant and so 
beseeching, that it really seems as if heaven could be 
won without a second thought. Place a million of 
gold before a man, and tell him that shall be his at 
the end of forty years' drudgery, and he will stoop to 
the drudgery, smiling as if he were going to a king's 
banquet; but let the angel Gabriel dime down, and 
throw that million into one scale and that man s soul 
into the other, and bid him choose which he would 
take, and can we doubt what his choice would be? 
No ! We do not mean to leave our souls in jeopardy. 
We do not mean to practise the folly of the drunkard, 
who pledges reputation, honor, everything dear to 
man, for a few hours of intoxicated mirth : but the 
gospel is like the sunrise ; it can be enjoyed any clay, 
it is always waiting for us ; we perpetually promise 
ourselves that we will attend to it, we will make the 
necessary exertion ; and day after day, year after 



84 THE OPEN DOOR. 

year, glides on, and leaves us sunk and torpid in the 
same old dream of what is to be when we have a con- 
venient season. 

But w r e make a fatal mistake. We misinterpret 
the freeness of the gospel ; we translate divine will- 
ingness into human facility ; and we forget that, 
with all Jesus' readiness to save us, w r e must be 
ready to be saved, or we defeat even the infinite love 
that seeks us. "Strive," said Jesus, "to enter in at 
the strait gate." Plainly there are difficulties to 
be overcome, some within us and some outside us. 
And this seems to me the very first truth contained 
in the Saviour's declaration, "I am the door." Where 
there is a door, there is a wall. Where there is an 
enclosure, there is no entrance possible save at some 
definite point. Jesus does speak of those w T ho 
climbed up some other way, but he speaks of them 
as thieves and robbers, and admits no right to be in 
the sheepfold which has not been legitimated by an 
entrance through the door. Now does the gospel 
rear such a wall around the blessings and treasures 
of the kingdom? There are men who discard the 
idea, who will have no hedges between the promises 
of love and the wants of men, who will acknowl- 
edge no conditions in the terms of salvation, no 
specific requirements, no inexorable demands, but 
who claim that the city of refuge is without gates ; 
that the kingdom of God is all highway, and that a 
man may choose his own road, and travel in any 
direction he pleases, with the perfect assurance of 
reaching the celestial home at last. They say that 



THE OPEN DOOR. 85 

forgiveness waits upon all men, and that the only 
really inaccessible place is the place where God has 
shut up the angels that kept not their first estate. 
But Jesus speaks of one sin, and says of it, "It shall 
never be forgiven men, neither in this world nor 
in that which is to come." They say there is no 
need that we should go to Christ, since he has come 
to us, and saved us whether we would or not. But 
Jesus says, " He that cometh unto me I will in no 
wise cast out." They say that salvation depends on 
no exercise of human volition. The best and the 
worst, the pious and the scoffing, the saint and the sin- 
ner, will march side by side in the great procession 
of the redeemed, and sit down together with Abra- 
ham, Isaac, and Jacob. But Jesus says, "He that 
believeth shall be saved, and he that belie veth not 
shall be damned." When we read these affirmations 
of Jesus, we can understand the feeling which 
prompted the disciples when they asked their mem- 
orable question. They had listened to the whole 
doctrine of Jesus ; they had witnessed all the pas- 
sionate yearning of his love, and knew how he 
longed to bring men under his healing hand and his 

CD CD CD 

saving tenderness ; and yet they were so moved by 
the apparent difficulties of salvation that they asked, 
and the words sound as if they were breathed out 
with all the palpitations of fear, and through lips 
quivering with intense concern, "Lord, are there 
few that be saved?" If there had been no occasion 
and no reason for this question, how easy it would 
have been for Jesus to answer it! With all his 
4 



86 THE OPEN DOOR. 

springing compassion he would have been in haste to 
reply, "No! there are not few. I have broken 
down every wall. I have made the way so broad 
that no one can miss it even if he try. I have 
blocked up the road to destruction, and I have made 
it as hard for a rich man to enter therein as for a 
camel to go through the eye of a needle." But what 
he did say was just the reverse of all this. It was 
enough, and more than enough, to confirm all the 
solemn anxieties which beat in the disciples' ques- 
tion. " Strait is the gate and narrow is the way 
that leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." 
What a difficulty that must be which stood confessed 
under the very eyes that wept over sinners ! A 
learned but unconverted minister of the Church of 
England once came upon these words in the lesson 
for the day, and as he read them the question came 
up in his mind, "Am I one of the few?" And the 
question went home with him, piercing him deeper 
and deeper, till he carried it, with tears and peni- 
tence, to Jesus himself, crying out, "Am I one of 
the few ? " 

Yes, there is a wall betweeen heaven and the sinner. 
The words of Jesus rise before us as the ponderous 
stones in that mighty wall. Its foundations are as 
deep as the wickedness of the heart, and as old as 
the guilt of Adam. It stood through ages, stern 
as the terror of the law which thundered, "The soul 
that sinneth it shall die." The angels of justice 
guarded it, like the flaming cherubim at the gates of 
Eden. It has taken omnipotence to pierce that wall. 



THE OPEN DOOR. 87 

It was the mystery of eternity how " God could be 
just, and yet justify the sinner." The love of Jesus 
has solved that mystery. The cross has framed itself, 
like an archway, in the wall of man's exclusion from 
heaven. Out of the blankness and darkness a door 
has opened, and the beams of hope come streaming 
through upon the lost and the guilty. The soul, 
stifling in the atmosphere of sin, and fainting with 
despair, has but to stand in presence of the gospel, 
and it is as if heaven had opened a window, and 
fanned him with a reviving breath. 

A party of miners in an English colliery were in 
great peril through a rush of foul air. They went 
staggering along the galleries, and mistaking their 
way seemed only to hasten into greater danger, till 
at last they sent forward the strongest man among 
them, and then sat clown, to wait for life or death. 
By and by, when they had wellnigh perished, they 
heard their comrade's voice resounding along the 
gallery, — "I see light ahead. Here is the shaft. 
Thank God for life ! " And when any weary sinner, 
pressed by the fear of death, and groping about for 
some way of deliverance, throws himself at the foot 
of the cross, it is with a joyousness of relief, with an 
exultation of discovery, that proclaim, "There is 
light ahead. Here is the door. Thank God for 
life ! " 

But I suppose no man doubts that the gospel does 
open a way of entrance into the kingdom of God. 
Even the sceptic will own that if there is any infal- 
lible pledge of immortality, it is to be found in the 



88 THE OPEN DOOR. 

teachings of Jesus ; if there is any opening through 
the dark wall of ignorance, which his eye beholds 
frowning everywhere around the narrow chambers of 
human life, he will admit that it is to be found at the 
cross and the sepulchre of Jesus. One of the disci- 
ples of an eminent infidel, when he lay at the point 
of death, sent for his master, and upbraiding him as 
the author of his misery, charged him by the agony 
he felt, by the doom he feared, to say what he should 
do to win if only a moment's respite from the 
anguish which he suffered ; and the infidel, forget- 
ting himself in his terror at the spectacle before him, 
answered the dying man, "Believe in Christ. Be- 
lieve in Christ. If any can save you, he can do it." 

We may think what we will, while life runs with a 
full tide, and the world is sweet with blossoms and 
gay with smiles ; we may fancy that we have oup 
own secret of admission into heaven, that we can 
unlock a hundred gates with our own private keys : 
but heap trouble and sorrow upon us, cut down our 
pride with the scythe of misfortune, or hold over our 
heads the formidable scvthe of death, and we have 
one conviction that shatters our theories into frag- 
ments, and that is that there is no refuge for a sinner 
but in the mercy of the gospel, no door of hope but 
that which opens at the voice of pleading penitence 
and faith in the Lord Jesus. 

But, consider again, how many there are who ac- 
cept what the gospel teaches of heaven and immor- 
tality, and believe that it docs open a door, and the 
only door, by which we can enter into them, while 



THE OPEN DOOR. 89 

yet they ignore, or overlook, the very place where 
the door is to be found. Some are searching for it 
in their own stainless morality. Some are trying to 
find it through the haze and fog of blinding misin- 
terpretations of Scripture. Some are expecting to 
reach it through their good works and charities, 
while others seem groping for it in the debris and 
rottenness of other men's characters, hoping that if 
such and such a man can gain admittance, they too 
may slip in, with plenty of room to spare. Invite 
them to enter the kingdom, and they look every 
man at his own preferred portion of the wall, and as 
the Christians at Corinth exclaimed, " I am of Paul," 
"I am of Apollos," "I am of Cephas," so these 
seem to cry, "I have my own door," "I will enter 
here," "I will knock there for admittance." While 
we may ask them, as Paul asked the Corinthians, "Is 
Christ divided?" Can you take Jesus in your moral- 
ity, while you exclude him from your religion? Can 
you seek Jesus in your personal virtues, when you 
shut him out of your hearts ? Can you rejoice at the 
blurs and blots you see on the image of Jesus in 
another, while no line of that image is discernible in 
yourselves? For observe, Jesus says, "I am the 
door." It is not what Jesus teaches, it is not what 
Jesus has done only, but what he is, that opens a way 
into the kingdom. It matters little what opinion we 
may entertain of the historical Jesus, how favora- 
ble our judgment may be, or how orthodox. It 
matters little what we believe about Jesus or con- 
cerning him. The Jesus that saves men is not a 



90 THE OPEN DOOR. 

past, but a present Jesus, not dead, but living; and 
the faith that brings us to him is not a faith towards 
him, but a faith into him, close as the bond of dear- 
est brotherhood, and vital as the sympathy between 
heart and lung. There was no more power to heal 
in the Saviour's visible arm, when he walked the 
earth, than there is to-day in that invisible arm, 
which he stretches forth to heal and save the sinner. 
There was no more glory in the footsteps that tracked 
the burning sands of the desert or pressed the lilies 
of the valley than there is to-day in those footprints 
which mark the Saviour's marshalling tread at the 
head of his conquering people, or those more beauti- 
ful steps which are as fragrant as flowers at the bed- 
side of the dying, on the turf of graves where lie our 
beloved, or in the house of mourning. The world 
has seen no other power like the power of Jesus, and 
that power owes it mightiness, its variety, its sharp- 
ness, its exquisite skilfulness, to the fact that it en- 
velops the same old nerve of divinity which trem- 
bled through the passion of the Saviour's life, in the 
tears and agony of the garden, and in the unutter- 
able languishments and expiations of love which 
wrapped the cross as with a veil of angelic sorrows. 
"I am the door," says Jesus, and these words come 
to us with the emphasis and the meaning of that eter- 
nal, "I am," which stamps the offices of Jesus with 
the perpetuity, not of historic interest and exemplary 
authority alone, but of enduring personality and un- 
broken continuity of living and almighty presence 
and power. 



THE OPEN DOOR. 91 

A few years ago a well-known and distinguished 
clergyman of one of our dubio-Ckristian denomi- 
nations preached in a Western town ; and he dis- 
coursed ably and eloquently on the redeeming and 
inspiring virtue of such an example as that left by 
Jesus, and tried to show that that was the great secret 
of what the gospel calls the atonement, that we have 
only to imitate Jesus, to cultivate his love for God 
and his benevolence toward men, and we should be 
saved. It was a time of great drought, and at the 
close of the sermon a poor old farmer, noted and 
honored for his warm love of Jesus and the singular 
purity and whiteness of his character, rose up and 
said, "The great man has told us much about the 
Jesus who lived 1800 years ago, but he has told us 
nothing about the Jesas of to-day. He has talked a 
great deal about the Jesus who went before us, but 
he has not said a word about the Jesus who walks 
with us, and is 'formed in us the hope of glory.' 
Now, I thank God for the rain of last }^ear. But for 
that I don't think I should have had any seed to plant 
this spring. But I cannot rely on the last year's rain 
to ripen my harvest next fall ; I want it to rain a little 
now; and I feel just so about Jesus. I bless God 
that he came among us so long ago, but we want him 
all the time, and 1 am glad that he told us, f Lo, I am 
with you always, even to the end.'" 

And the old farmer struck the key-note of all 
Christian experience. It is the personal Jesus, with 
all the investiture of his divine powers, who now 
speaks in his word, pleads with his Spirit, and offers 



92 THE OPEN DOOR. 

his help to need} 7 sinners. He is the way, he is the 
door, and whoever would find life must come to him 
as to an actual and embodied presence, and casting 
off all dependence on his own morality or good 
w T orks, must simply pray, 

" O Jesus, I Lave naught to plead, 
In earth beneath or heaven above, 
But just my own exceeding need 
And thy exceeding love." 

And let me remark now, that by God's great mercy 
this is an open door, wide open, which no man can 
close against another, and through which every re- 
penting soul can pass. God shows no indulgence to 
the stubborn and wilful sinner. He lays stripes upon 
him. He arrays the very laws of nature against him. 
He turns the very honey of his pleasures into corro- 
sive acid. He surrounds him with ghastly mockeries 
of all he has sought and loved, till, when death comes, 
life itself appears to him but a monstrous distortion, 
aud the future is peopled with the gigantic shapes of 
the sins he loathes and the punishment he fears. 
But let the sinner come to Jesus with his head bowed 
down in shame, and his heart melted with contrition, 
and a thousand ministering hands are outspread to 
Avelcome him, and though he has piled his sins up at 
the very threshold of mercy's door, love sweeps them 
all away, the door is opened to him, andsougs of joy 
«:ush out to cheer him as Jesus bends down and lifts 
him through. 

In the old days of the slave-trade there was a cap- 
tain of a slaver whose hands were dyed with all the 



THE OPEN DOOR. 93 

atrocities of the middle passage, but whom remorse 
had at length overtaken, and driven into all the pit- 
iful anguish of a man who thought he had sinned too 
deeply for Jesus to pardon him. One Sunday, in 
great wretchedness, almost tempted to throw him- 
self into the water, he went into the Bethel on the 
East River, and there he heard a sermon on the words 
of our text ; and as the pastor, himself a converted 
seaman, discoursed on the ample and abounding love 
of Jesus, and ended at length by a cordial invitation 
to sinners, exclaiming, "The door is open. Jesus 
keeps it open. He can't shut it, mercy will not let 
him. He does not want to shut it, not even against 
the guiltiest. All may come. Jesus asks you all," 
the heart -stricken captain, unable to restrain his 
emotions, sprang from his seat, and in accents of 
pathos that thrilled the congregation, cried out, " O, 
say that again, say it all over again ! Those are the 
sweetest words I ever heard. Here is a poor wretch 
that is only waiting to come in, if he can find a chance. 
Tell me the door is open, and show me how to find 
it, and I will go through if I have to leave all my 
flesh behind me." Yes, the door is open. The 
persecuting Saul found it open, Mary Magdalen 
found it open, the dying thief found it open ; Jesus 
watches for all. The fountain of his blood is 
troubled and waiting for all ; and the largest, black- 
est, deepest sinner may come to that fountain, singing 
with perfect confidence, 

"And there may I, though vile as he, 
Wash all my stains away." 

4* 



94 THE OPEN DOOR. 

If Christians could take pride in any characteristic 
of the gospel, they might erect themselves and vaunt 
themselves at the boundless capaciousness of the 
mercy which receives the sinner. Yet sin-laden 
men, apostate Christians, and even good and faith- 
ful disciples, are often fretted and harassed by the 
thought that they have revolted from all grace, and 
salvation is impossible for them. That good and 
great man, Bishop Butler, author of the "Analogy 
of Revealed and Natural Religion," when he lay down 
to die, found his spirit enshrouded with distrust and 
his death-bed hung round with gloom, till, as one of 
his friends w 7 as trying to comfort him, and was read- 
ing these words, "Whosoever believeth on me hath 
everlasting life," "Stop!" cried Butler, "let me 
think on those words. c Whosoever,' that is strong 
language. That really seems to take in Samuel 
Butler; yea, it takes in all the Butlers that be- 
lieve. I certainly believe Jesus is all my hope, 
Jesus will take me in." And the light of peace 
dawned again and broke through the clouds, and 
shone upon the track by which he went through 
the gates of death, and entered into the kingdom 
011 high. 

My friends, I invite you to seek the door of the 
kingdom. In vain does it stand open, in vain does 
Jesus wait to take you in, if you wall not come to 
Jesus and press to enter in. He will not close the 
door against you while life lasts ; do not close it 
against yourselves. Do not venture to abuse all 
your opportunities, and go down to death at last, 



THE OPEN DOOR. 95 

crying, like the exiled English statesman, f 'I am 
banished from the kingdom ; I might have been 
chief among those who stand before my king, 
but my folly has beggared me and banished me 
forever ! " 



ANALOGY AS CONFIRMING THE CHRISTIAN 
DOCTRINES OF THE FUTURE WORLD, THE 
REWARD OF SAINTS, AND THE PUNISH- 
MENT OF SINNERS. 



" The labor of the righteous tendeth to life, the fruit of the nicked to 
sin." — Pkov. x, 16. 

All the parts of that vast scheme which constitutes 
God's government over his creatures must have one 
fixed, constant, unalterable purpose and end. We 
may not be able to ascertain what it is, but whatever 
it is, we know that it is necessary, from the very nature 
of the Supreme Being, that it should be in all places 
aud ail ages the same ; and we are able to discover 
with clearness and certainty, that, however numerous 
may be the more proximate and less important pur- 
poses comprehended by that final object, they must 
all be connected and harmonized by a common refer- 
ence and a common contribution to that final purpose. 
And from these premises we are able further to con- 
clude, that all the means and instruments used by 
Almighty wisdom must be characterized by a similar 
agreement ; that since they are designed to secure the 
same great object, or to promote some purpose which 
directly refers to that object, and is subsidiary to it, 
they must all be connected one with another, and 



ANALOGY AS CONFIRMING CHRISTIAN DOCTRINES. 97 

sustain a constant relation of reciprocal reference and 
dependence. Now it is by these considerations that 
we are led to the knowledge of that law of analogy, 
which, however, is not asserted merely by abstract 
speculations, but is demonstrated by all that man has 
yet learned of the world in which he lives, and of the 
universe of which that world is so small a part. For 
iu the arrangements by which infinite wisdom and 
goodness govern the earth and its inhabitants, we dis- 
cover, obvious to every eye, such proportion and 
harmony as could subsist only in a plan whose separate 
portions consent and conduct to a common object, in 
other words, an analogy, pervading all the laws of 
matter and mind, and forming a bond of closest union 
among all the works and creatures of Almighty Power. 
And this prevailing law of analogy it is which fur- 
nishes to man one of the safest practical principles 
of his conduct, and the strongest supports of his 
reason and judgment. It is this which enlightens 
his future and directs his present, teaches him pru- 
dence and inspires him with confidence ; and whenever 
this law is contradicted by an object which solicits his 
faith or invites his effort, he loses his assurance in 
doubt, and feels as one groping in darkness. Now, 
since the Author of all things is one and eternal, 
"without variableness or shadow of turniug," since 
his great and ultimate purposes must be, like himself, 
fixed and immutable, we have reason to believe that 
the same law of analogy which we discover in all the 
departments of human knowledge, pervades the entire 
universe, and that the same essential principles of 



98 ANALOGY AS CONFIRMING CHRISTIAN DOCTRINES. 

Divine government whieh we find to prevail on earth 
are in truth everywhere the fundamental principles of 
God's self-manifestation. And if we may thus ex- 
pand the law of analogy from the earth to the universe, 
widening its application from a mere point in space 
to the vast and boundless heavens, much more surely 
and safely may we expand the same law from the 
present to the future, widening its application from a 
mere point in eternity, to the ceaseless roll and lapse 
of future ages. Doing this, we must then believe that 
the principles of God's present government of man 
afford us the knowledge of the system and laws by 
which God will govern man hereafter. That consti- 
tution and order under which we now live, and accord- 
ing to which our actual experience of happiness or 
misery is determined, clearly show us what will be the 
Divine arrangement according to which our destinv 
will be fixed in the world to come. 

This argument from analogy is thus entirely inde- 
pendent of the proof from God's word. We draw 
our conclusions, not from what God has revealed in 
the Bible, but from what he has written on his works, 
and disclosed in the whole course of his actual dealings 
with his creatures. We show by this that the prin- 
ciples of his future government, as they are explained 
in his word, are not inconsistent with, but are con- 
firmed by, the laws of that natural constitution under 
which we actually live. 

There are many who raise objections to the doctrines 
of the Bible, as violating what they are pleased to 
regard as the character of the Divine Being, and as 



ANALOGY AS CONFIRMING CHRISTIAN DOCTRINES. 99 

conflicting with those ideas of superlative goodness 
which they suppose to be the great and exclusive 
principles of God's method of government. There 
are those who object to the Scriptural doctrines of 
the last judgment, and the future felicity or misery 
of mankind, as contrary to reason, and much more 
contrary to the Divine attributes. If, then, laying 
aside all proof from interpretation of the Scripture, 
w r e deduce a confirmation of the doctrines thus denied 
from the simple analogy of man's present condition 
and the principles of God's actual government over 
men in this world, we shall derive an argument and 
proof too strong and certain to be gainsaid or resisted. 
Let us begin with that principle which lies at the basis 
of God's future government, and man's future state, 
that this present life is designed to be a course of 
preparation for the life which is to succeed. We lay 
aside for the moment all the proofs which are fur- 
nished by the Christian religion, and only ask how far 
this principle is warranted and upheld by our actual 
experience in this world. And we draw a strong 
confirmation from that law which w T e are taught pre- 
vails through all the orders and ranks of being, 
animal and vegetable, in the lower creation, that law 
of progression which marks the life and growth of 
every creature, of everything, into many distinct 
stages of development, following one after another 
in regular and undeviating sequence. In truth, what 
is growth itself, what is the meaning of the term, and 
what the idea which is included in the fact, but this 
very law of progression? Nothing lives only as it 



100 ANALOGY AS CONFIRMING CHRISTIAN DOCTRINES. 

embodies and develops this law. Xothing through- 
out the wide universe, so far as we know, accomplishes 
its end, and attains its natural perfection, but by this 
successive unfolding and expansion of its powers. 
In the vegetable and in the animal are to be found 
the same periods of gradual advancement, the same 
marks of a progressive existence. Man becomes mas- 
ter of all the faculties of his humanity, physical and 
moral, he attains the stature and perfection of man- 
hood, only as he thus successively accomplishes the 
different stages of his growth, and passes from infancy 
to age. We have, then, all the force of this analogy 
to sustain the belief, that our future history will be 
governed by the law of progression, of gradual de- 
velopment ; that in truth, our earthly life involves only 
the incipient periods of human life, and the eternal 
ages beyond will carry on this life by the same prin- 
ciples, passing it through a series of advancing stages, 
toward the high and perfect type of humanity realized 
in the character of our Lord Jesus Christ. But we 
observe, in the second place, that this law of progres- 
sion involves and comprehends the principle that each 
stage of growth is but an advance on the previous, 
and a preparation for the following stage, a principle 
which we know to be too obvious for proof. Every 
period of life commences with the same degree of 
development with which the previous period ended. 
It takes up the powers which are furnished by the 
former stages of growth, and carries them on to the 
next succeeding period. At no step in the process 
can you find in the animal or the plant what was not 



ANALOGY AS CONFIRMING CHRISTIAN DOCTRINES. 101 

there in the beginning. No step adds anything which 

is not a legitimate consequence of natural develop- 
ment, or confers any power which was not, in the 
very beginning, provided for in the nature and the 
laws of the animal or plant. We discover at a 
glance that this is the principle according to which 
the life of man is unfolded and governed. His 
infancy is, in the strictest sense, an incipient period 
of growth, naturally leading him to, and fitting him 
for, the advanced stage of youth. His youth is, in 
the most literal sense, a preparation for manhood 
and all its vigorous life and exertion. His manhood 
involves no powers, confers no ability, which were not 
provided in his youth. His youth is, by the evident 
design of nature, and in actual experience, a school 
for his manhood. It does, beyond all question, give 
shape and coloring to the periods that follow it. It 
is the porch and vestibule of his manly age, the seed- 
time of his harvest, the young and healthful, or 
sickly plant, which is afterwards matured or dwarfed 
in the vigorous or rotten tree of his character and 
life. Carrying forward this principle likewise, and 
applying it, by the argument of analogy, to the 
future destiny of man, we are led to the conclusion, 
firm and irresistible, which we announced at the 
beginning, that this life is a process of preparation 
for that which is to come. Just as we see the dif- 
ferent periods of human life on earth connected by 
the relation of antecedent and consequent, cause and 
effect, we must believe our present humanity to be 
connected with our future destiny. We are com- 



102 ANALOGY AS CONFIRMING CHRISTIAN DOCTRINES. 

pelled by analogy to acknowledge this relation, com- 
pelled to the belief, that the principles of God's 
present method of dealing with us will be carried 
on into the future world. We shall, then, commence 
in eternity, with the same character and powers which 
we may possess and exhibit at death. Whatever 
they be, they will form the germs of our future 
development, just as we see the powers of youth 
entering into the growth and life of manhood. 
Death is only a passage from the present to the 
future. It is not a member of that series of stages 
by which our nature is really unfolded and regularly 
expanded. It is merely a transit from one stage to 
another, the connecting link between the present and 
the future life. To be sure, one part of man will be 
wdiolly terminated by death, all the earthy and mor- 
tal ; but all of him which shall survive beyond the 
grave, the soul, in which lies his distinguishing 
excellence as man, and not brute, will, by the law of 
succession, enter upon its course of immortality, just 
as it was prepared in this present mode of existence. 
Holy or unholy, virtuous or vicious, it will stand, it 
must stand, at the gate of the infinite clothed with the 
very same character in which it shall have been found 
by death. If it would be folly to demand in us on 
earth powers or habits to which we have not been 
trained and educated, equally foolish would it be, by 
the law of analogy, to expect in the being after 
death a character which he never acquired before it. 
We observe that in the actual experience of man on 
earth, there is a universal, fixed, absolute relation 



ANALOGY AS CONFIRMING CHRISTIAN DOCTRINES. 103 

between the character which he possesses, and the 
happiness or misery which he enjoys or suffers. No 
man who has attentively considered his own life, or 
who has made himself acquainted with the history of 
others, will for one moment hesitate to avow his 
belief in this principle. There is a natural connec- 
tion between the evil one does, and that he suffers. 
A disregard of the laws of our being is attended, by 
necessity, with penalties of pain and suffering. Phys- 
ically and morally, transgression is punished with 
unhappiness. A conduct that defies the laws of 
nature, and tramples on their authority, brings upon 
itself an amount of misery proportioned to the 
offence. Vice is imbued, in its essence and sub- 
stance, with the elements of moral degradation and 
ruin. Immorality, despising the plainest principles 
of our being, tends always to certain misery. Virtue, 
obedience to the nature of man and the constitution 
of things, just as certainly tends to happiness and 
peace. It will not avail to say that this order is 
often broken, this connection often destroyed, that 
virtue loses its reward and vice escapes its punish- 
ment. We are seeking for the ordained law by 
which man is commonly governed. We see, indeed, 
that the plainest principles of our bodily existence 
are often thwarted, and that physical suffering is pre- 
vented by the appliance of remedies or the ingenuity 
of practice ; yet we never hesitate to declare, in spite 
of this, that the neglect of physical laws is attended 
with pain, that he who thrusts his hand into fire will 



104 ANALOGY AS CONFIRMING CHRISTIAN DOCTRINES. 

be burned, for this is the natural tendency, and we 
call this tendency a law. 

Now, all the provisions of nature, all the laws of 
the universe, material and intelligent, are the ordi- 
nations of God. They are the statutes, the principles 
of his government. We are, in this life, as much 
under the control of his power, as much subject to 
his will, as we ever shall be. It is by his own 
appointment that we live as we do, and under the 
principles by which we are governed. Our actual 
experience on earth is determined as surely by his 
constitution of things, as we can ever suppose it will 
be hereafter. We are, therefore, compelled to admit, 
that in God's present government of man, it is a 
fixed principle that all vice shall be punished with 
suffering, and virtue rewarded with happiness, and 
we are obliged to acknowledge that this principle is 
the general rule by which human experience is meas- 
ured, in its share of pleasure or pain. This is the 
tendency of human conduct, and the tendency is 
enough of itself to establish the law. Now, of what 
avail is it to object that there are so many instances 
in which vice goes unpunished and virtue unre- 
warded? The only inference is, that the principle is 
not fully carried out, and the most that we can con- 
clude is, that there is so far an incompleteness in the 
divine government, that its principles lack a perfect 
execution. And if this incompleteness goes to prove 
anything in respect to the destiny of man, it goes to 
assure us that a time is coming when this imperfec- 
tion will be adjusted, when this principle will be 



ANALOGY AS CONFIRMIXG CHRISTIAN DOCTRINES. 105 

wholly carried out, when virtue shall be rewarded 
and vice shall be punished in the full extent, and to 
the letter and spirit of the divine law. And this 
conclusion is confirmed by that force of analogy 
which we have thus far applied. Apart from all 
questions respecting the character of this law, that 
sin will be attended with misery, and holiness with 
happiness, we have every proof, drawn from the 
present condition of man, to assure the belief that 
this same law will be the rule of our destiny here- 
after. And of what value can be the objection, so 
often urged, that the future punishment of sin would 
be inconsistent with the character of the Deity ? Of 
what value? If it is unjust for God to punish sin in 
the world to come, it must be unjust upon principle, 
and then it would be as inconsistent to punish sin at 
one time as at another, and in one, even the least 
degree, as in even the highest. 

We can no more imagine God capable of commit- 
ting a small degree of sin, than we can imagine him 
capable of all sin together. If, then, it is unjust upon 
principle that God should inflict misery upon sin- 
ners, we are not to suppose that one single instance 
of such punishment can be found in the whole history 
of the universe. And what a supposition would this 
be in the face of God's actual government of man on 
earth, a government in which, as we have seen, the 
tendency of all human conduct is ever according to 
the fixed law, that sin leads to, and ends in suffering, 
as holiness leads to happiness ! 

It is useless to argue against the future punishment 



106 ANALOGY AS CONFIRMING CHRISTIAN DOCTRINES. 

of sin, so long as our experience testifies with daily 
and hourly voice that misery lies at the end of every 
path of sin ; and if sin succeed in escaping it while on 
this earth, our reason teaches us that Almighty jus- 
tice must rectify the exception by the awards of the 
life to come. The very perfections of the Godhead 
are involved in the execution of this principle. If 
virtue is not to be rewarded, if vice and guilt are to 
go unpunished in a future life, then must our reason 
be confounded in the admission, that man has the 
power to elude the vigilance of the Most High, that 
he has the ability to turn aside one of the most evi- 
dent arrangements of his government, and that he 
may, by mere dexterity, shield himself from the pen- 
alties God has threatened, and make him a respecter 
of persons, and a partial judge among men. 

We thus learn how unanimously and forcibly the 
voice of reason and nature exclaims in attestation of 
the revealed doctrines of the Bible. We learn how 
flatly the partial views of those who refuse these doc- 
trines are contradicted by the evidences that lie in 
multitudes on every side, and along the whole path 
of life. The eternal world opens its portals to re- 
ceive us just as we are, "with all our sins and guilt, 
or our virtues ; and it opens to conduct us only to a 
higher stage of existence, where we shall appear just 
as we are fitted to appear while here in the body. 
Xo miracle is promised to transform our natures 
alter death has consumed the clay that conceals 
them. No new powers are pledged to aid us in 
shaking off the grasp and fiendish embrace of a guilty 



ANALOGY AS CONFIRMING CHRISTIAN DOCTRINES. 107 

conscience. Heaven will spurn ns from its gates, as 
surely ns we spurn heaven's offers on earth. The 
consequences which time did not bring forth from the 
mass of our guilt and degradation, eternity will ripen 
with all the quickened powers of our souls, and the 
misery which we succeeded in escaping here, w T ill 
then come upon us with accelerated speed and inten- 
sified bitterness. It was because these truths are 
the inviolable laws of God's universe, it was because 
these laws could be annulled by no human power, 
that Jesus Christ brought himself and his gospel 
upon earth. He offers us his assistance to retrieve 
our downward footsteps. He pledges his Almighti- 
iness to our support, in the effort to throw from our 
consciences and characters the burden which, in 
eternity, must inevitably crush our souls in misery 
and wreck. 

Let us strive to attain, ere the end of this brief 
preparatory life, the germs which may grow up into 
immortal felicity. Let us acquire powers which will 
not leave ns, after the judgment, behind all the ranks 
of God's creatures, the lowest, the meanest, and the 
feeblest ! All that we gain here of moral advantages, 
we shall keep hereafter. All the knowledge, all the 
sound and educated ability, all the Christian attain- 
ments, which we can gather before death comes to 
remove us, we shall carry with us into the sacred and 
blessed employments and pleasures of heaven, and 
they will form the germs of that course of high 
angelic discipline which shall continue, through the 
long periods of immortality, to place us nearer and 
nearer the throne and presence of Infinite Wisdom. 



CHRIST SUFFERING.* 



" Ought not Christ to have suffered these things?" — Luke xxiv, 2.6. 

To many minds, unenlightened by the Holy Ghost, 
the sufferings of our blessed Lord, awful as they 
seem, and in reality were, appear to have been purely 
gratuitous, and to have been invoked upon himself by 
an exalted martyr spirit, that shrank from no sacrifice, 
however great or fearful. This is the view of all those 
who regard Jesus Christ only in the character of a 
distinguished reformer, rising like a brilliant meteor 
when the heavens were black, attracting the gaze, 
astonishing the hearts of men for a season, and then 
sinking back in gloom forever, save a few rays left 
behind to struggle in the darkness. How could such 
partial observers of our Lord's character and mission 
apprehend those eternal reasons, appreciate the depths 
of that love, which moved him to bow the heavens and 
come down to save man? How could they know 
anything of that infinite argument, the divine wis- 
dom which underlies, as a necessiry groundwork, the 
whole scheme of redemption ? For to them Christ 
appears not as he really was ; that more glorious half, 
his divine nature, is denied him ; nor over the dreacl- 

* This series of three sermons, "The Sufferings, Crucifixion, and 
Resurrection of Christ," was written when the author was hut twenty- 
one years of age. 



CHRIST SUFFERING. 109 

fill cross, shrouded in the thick night that closed 
upon his sacrificial agonies, broods a solitary ray ot 
the Father's glory. To such, therefore, our Saviour 
must ever seem as some earthly hero, whose toils and 
death were not only voluntary, which we believe, but 
undergone merely because they were inevitable, the 
natural reaction of the elements against which lie had 
been contending, which we do not believe. Sucq 
persons, like the two disciples of Emmaus, may 
lavish their sympathy upon Jesus of Nazareth, and 
burn incense to his exalted virtues and beneficent 
deeds, but they are not prepared to lift their hearts 
in holy reverence to the Christ of God, or to make 
his intense sufferings and vicarious death the ground 
of a blessed hope of heaven and glory. Be it not so 
with us ! But while w^e wonder at the scorn and hate 
he received for the more than mortal goodness that 
flowed through all his life, stand amazed at his 
dreadful agonies in Gethsemane, and awe -struck at 
the sight of the bowed head, the outstretched hands, 
nailed and bleeding, of the Son of God on the cross, 
let us recall to our minds the words he spake to the 
two disciples, " Ought not Christ to have suffered 
these things?" Let us pay close attention to this 
language. He does not say, "Ought not that man 
whose death ye deplore," but, " Ought not that 
divine Being whose advent ye still expect, that prom- 
ised Saviour who is the anointed of God, to suffer 
these things?" For we may observe that the per- 
fect tense in our translation does not render the 
original exactly, which is not by any means so defi- 
5 



110 CHRIST SUFFERING. 

nite. On this direct reference to the Redeemer 
spoken of by the prophets lies a strong argument in 
favor of Jesus of Nazareth as that Redeemer. Now 
the two disciples seemed to object to the redemptorial 
character of Jesus of Nazareth, on the ground that 
he had now died, before restoring their lost kingdom 
to the Jews, whereas, in their opinion, according to 
their interpretation of- the prophets, the promised 
Redeemer should soon, or at least not long after 
his advent, assume the reins of an earthly govern- 
ment, and live king forever. And in this belief 
they were only clinging to the notions prevalent 
among the Jews, and notions not yet dissipated from 
the minds of the twelve intimate disciples of Jesus. 
Hence, however strong had been their faith in the 
abject son of Joseph and Mary, whose mightiness 
" in deed and in word " gave a bright promise of 
speedy deliverance from their oppressors, his sudden 
death, and that death so unjust and ignominious, now 
quenched all their hopes. And, as if still further to 
strengthen their objections against his divine char- 
acter, they add, "And beside all this, to-day is the 
third day since these things were done." Entirely 
to refute these objections, our Lord appeals to their 
knowledge of the Scriptures, asking them if the 
divine Saviour promised in the prophets was not 
clearly and emphatically set forth as a sacrifice, " a 
lamb led to the slaughter," as one who, before en- 
tering into his glory, that is, before assuming the 
sceptre of his kingdom, must pass through many 
sufferings, and even die. And to enlighten their 



CHRIST SUFFERING. Ill 

understandings, and prove that Christ was thus 
appointed to death, he commences at Moses, and 
expounds to* them all those portions of the divine 
word which relate to himself, showing thus that the 
death of Jesus of Nazareth, so far from being an 
objection against, is a strong and conclusive argu- 
ment in favor of his redemptorial character, as the 
Saviour predicted by the prophets. 

The present discussion will embrace two points, 
what and why Christ suffered. It is impossible for 
us not to be moved at the spectacles of intense hard- 
ship which present themselves in the whole course 
of our Lord's life. We are to suppose ourselves ac- 
quainted with the whole design he had in view, and 
to be informed of the disinterestedness of his motives ; 
and then, with this knowledge freshened and en- 
larged at every successive stage in the events of his 
history, we shall be better prepared to sympathize 
with this innocent man in all his sufferance of hate 
and cruelty. I need not do more than barely to 
mention those more remarkable incidents in his 
earlier history which disclose to our view the extreme 
poverty that ever attended upon him, and the fearful 
malice which, coming from the high places of the 
nation, constantly frowned upon him in public, and 
with an evil eye that glared with unhallowed passion 
watched him in his most secluded retreats. From 
the time of his astonishing discussion with the doctors 
in the temple till his public ministry, he lived in 
retirement with his parents, working with his own 
hands for the bread he ate, and undergoing all the 



112 CHRIST SUFFERING. 

toils, the fatigues, the struggles, of the most ordinary 
mechanic. Let us dwell upon this portion of his life. 
We of the present clay are not prepared at once to 
form a correct opinion upon this section of our 
Lord's history : and we who live in a country where 
the high distinctions of old aristocracy throw no 
shadow upon the lot of the workingman, we of a 
republican nation, are of all least qualified, without 
careful study, to enter into the spirit of the " olden 
time," when caste and rank drew broad lines of sepa- 
ration and raised lofty barriers between the working, 
toiling millions, and the proud, vaunting, despotic 
few who set the iron heel of power upon them, until, 
like crushed worms, they writhed and bled in helpless 
wretchedness. He felt all the bitterness of those 
narrowing conventionalities of society that denied to 
him a just position, and one in which he might have 
both received and imparted the sympathies of human 
kindness. Think now where we are ; we are in the 
workshop of an obscure mechanic. How can we 
refrain from calling to mind the most illustrious of 
the sons of science, of philosophy, of theology, of art? 
The workshop has been blessed by heaven itself as 
the birthplace of mighty genius, and the school in 
which the noblest intellects have trained themselves. 
He was not the pupil of some proud teacher in the 
temple. He was brought up at the feet of no Ga- 
maliel, but he was self-taught in all the learning of 
Moses and the prophets. And now let us behold him 
in the public labors of his ministry. He entered 
upon them when he was about thirty years of age. 



CHRIST SUFFERING. 113 

Did he expound the prophets in the synagogue of his 
own native village ? Despite the eloquence that gushed 
in a living stream from his lips, his neighbors shook 
oft 1 the spell of his discourse by taking refuge under 
his humble parentage. Is not this Joseph's son? And 
when, oppressed by the thought of such hollow- 
hearted pride, such paltry infidelity, he attempted to 
vindicate his position, then the whole assembly 
rushed upon him with maniac fury, dragged him to 
the brow of a hill, and sought to "hurl him dow r n 
headlong." Follow him on his lonesome way, mark 
his tears, listen to his cries, and well may you believe 
the prophets ; he is a " man of sorrows and acquaint- 
ed with grief." Again we behold him covertly steal- 
ing out of the city and winding his weary path along 
the vale of Jehoshaphat, to the lowly cots of Bethany. 
He loves intercourse with unsophisticated nature, 
because he knows that for truth, the truth which he 
came to teach man, there is no more genial home 
than the heart of the mighty people. He loves the 
oppressed masses, and they love him. Then why is 
he not permitted quietly to pursue his labors, and to 
elevate from the rank of bondmen the drudges of the 
priestly caste and the tools of craft and policy in high 
places ? 

His motives are either misunderstood or miscon- 
strued, his object but imperfectly known even to 
his most intimate friends. As a man, he was often 
beset by the seductions of fame and glory, tempted 
to sell his soul to Satan, that on the throne of an 
earthly dynasty he might sit in the splendor of a 



114 CHRIST SUFFERING. 

king. With Jill the suggestions of the Devil, with all 
the idolizing fondness of the people, he was obliged 
to contend, as well as with his avowed persecutors. 
He was continually waging war with the iron usages 
of society and the pernicious dogmas of a degenerate 
religion. His path was hedged on the right and on 
the left. Thus was he compelled to work the works 
of Him that sent him, while all hell and Judaea were 
thirsting for his blood. 

We are now to behold him in the closing scenes of 
his life ; his energies are now ripe for suffering, as 
well as for victory, and his full soul feels strong to bear 
the awful burden imposed by divine justice. Let us 
take a view of the chief events that fill up the measure 
of our Lord's suffering. Behold him just passing out 
of the gate of the city. He has blessed and eaten 
bread with his disciples for the last time. The sweet 
friendship which binds them to his heart is about to 
be broken up, and as the last strains of the hymn they 
lately sang together still linger in their ears, he talks 
affectionately to them of the time when, in his upper 
kingdom, they shall join in drinking of a new cup and 
swelling a new song of praise. It is night, and the 
most solemn stillness spreads over the gloomy grove 
which they are just entering, broken only by the rus- 
tling of the leaves and the murmur of the brook, a faint 
sound of distant music floating upon the air, and the 
sifi'hs and sobs that continue to break forth from bosoms 
oppressed with grief. Behind them flows the Cedron, 
which they have just crossed ; and before them, its 
summit crowned with the rich foliage of the trees, 



CHRIST SUFFERING. 115 

through which many a star is seen glimmering, rises 
the Mount of Olives. It is here, just at the foot 01 
the bill, that our Lord has been wont to meet his dis- 
ciples and teach them the great things of his king- 
dom. Here has his voice broken out in fervent suppli- 
cation, here has he prostrated himself alone before his 
Father. Could these trees speak, had these flowers 
tongues, oh, what stories would they tell us of bursts 
of anguish, prayers that seemed to rend the very 
heavens, and bring angels down to listen in astonish- 
ment. Now we are to witness a scene of anguish 
unparalleled forever. The little band has passed 
the entrance, and our Lord, commanding them to 
pray, goes farther into the wood, and is soon lost in 
the darkness, at the distance of a stones cast from 
them. Here, kneeling down, he prays, " Father, it 
thou be willing, remove this cup from me. " This is 
the language of a heart utterly prostrate beneath a 
sense of pain too grievous to be borne. Jesus is now 
in the power of a dreadful curse. From the trans- 
gression of the first man down to this hour the cup 
of wrath has been filling up, God now pours into it 
the justice due to any repenting sinner, down to the 
last day of grace, and then hands it to his Son, that 
he may drink it to the dregs. A mountain, a tre- 
mendous load of human guilt, is resting upon him. 
From kneeling he bows his face upon the earth, 
stretches out his hands before him, lies like one 
accursed, withered under the frown of Omnipotence. 
He has just prayed that the cup of anguish might 
pass, yet he cries, "Not my will, but thine be done " ; 



116 CHRIST SUFFERING. 

and he still drains it off, though, with the almighti- 
ness that slumbers in his arm, he could dash it 
aside, and let it flow like liquid fire over the guilty 
world. Here is a diviue being, with all the spiritual- 
ized sensitiveness of infinite perfection, stretched on 
the ground, the Son of God smitten with the univer- 
sal curse of human guilt. 

Whatever way you look at it, with whatever ar- 
guments you approach this subject, you are over- 
whelmed with the conviction that our Lord's anguish 
in the garden is beyond all the powers of speech or 
thought. Heaven itself is amazed, and the eye of 
every angel is riveted on the spectacle of a prostrate 
God ! And can this cup pass from his lips ? Oh, is 
there no help in heaven? His disciples have wept 
themselves into unconscious slumber, and lie wrapped 
in the folds of their garments under the foliage of a 
cluster of olives. But there is a watch in heaven 
over that prostrate form. The eternal Father be- 
holds his Son agonizing on the ground ; and from his 
presence he sends an angel, Who, on wings fleet as 
the lightning, flies down, enters the grove, touches 
the almost lifeless form and invigorates it with fresh 
strength. Oh, what a sight is this ! An angel minis- 
tering to his sorrow-smitten God ! And again he 
prays, more earnestly than before. Fresh strength has 
sharpened anew his pains, and who can tell that fear- 
ful doubts are not now assailing the steadfastness of 
his heart? Satan has tempted him before, when the 
keen sense of hunger had fastened on the body of his 
intended victim and reduced it to weakness. Who 



CHRIST SUFFERING. 117 

can say that the wily tempter is not now availing 
himself of the extreme prostration of our Lord, and 
endeavoring, with all the cogency of argument that 
he can wield, to sway him from his purpose? He 
holds, perhaps, such language as this, "Let the world 
perish, let sinners meet their doom. Kid yourself 
of this horrible anguish. Justice will approve it, 
heaven will shout at your return, and hell will open 
wide its jaws to swallow the accursed race of Adam ! " 
But our Lord replies, "I came to save man, and I 
must not falter in my purpose. The world is sink- 
ing, and my arm alone can bear it up. Away, thou 
enemy of God and man ! I am sent to bruise thy 
head, to rescue the victim from thy grasp, and by 
my agonies and blood to win deliverance for the 
world." And now the hour has past, its sufferings 
have baptized a glorious victory. There is music in 
heaven. The Saviour rises and passes slowly and 
feebly to the group of his disciples still slumbering 
on the ground, gently bidding them rise. Well has 
it been for them to be wrapped in sleep. Would not 
their bosoms have yearned with self-distressing sym- 
pathy had they been permitted to behold their Mas- 
ter languishing on the damp ground? A kind Provi- 
dence has spared them this gush of grief, that they 
may have strong resolution to face the dangers now 
gathering thick and black around them. And as 
they sit in a little circle, drinking in the instructions 
and consolations of their Lord, a dim light appears 
at a distance-, in the direction of the city. And now 
another and another is seen flashing on the gloom, 



118 CHRIST SUFFERING. 

and rocking to and fro and up and down, like the 
watchlights of a bark riding on the sea. Ever and 
anon dark forms are suddenly disclosed by some 
broader ray, and there is a gleam of weapons, bran- 
dished as in defiance, and cutting circular lines of 
fiery glow on the thick shadows, save where the light 
is intercepted by the body of some old tree. And 
now all are buried in the valley of the Ceclron ; but 
at intervals a nois}' shout rings out upon the still air, 
and up the stream the moving lights throw a quiver- 
ing reflection on the bosom of the rippling waters. 
And now they all ascend the bank, a fierce-looking 
rabble, with swords and lanterns, their bearded 
visages and glaring eyes and boisterous merriment 
betokening purposes of some dark deed. 

They enter the quiet grove, some parting to the 
right and left, and others advancing directly to the 
spot where our Lord and his disciples are still re- 
clining. The prey is soon found, and a shout of, 
"Here they are," brings the host together around 
their leader. The disciples arise, Peter draws his 
sword ; Jesus advances towards the mob, and is met 
by the traitor, who gives him the betraying kiss, the 
signal agreed upon by the multitude, who now rush 
forward to secure their victim. The foremost" assail- 
ant is boldly met by Peter, who aims a heavy blow 
at his head, but the weapon is either parried or 
dodged, and only cuts off an ear. Jesus rebukes the 
martial spirit of the passionate disciple, and com- 
mands him to put up his sword into its sheath. 
Never again shall this spot of earth be trodden by 



CHRIST SUFFERING. 119 

the feet of the Son of God. No more shall the stars 
look down through this canopy of leaves upon the 
prostrate form of Him who placed them in the 
heavens and hade them shine. These old trees shall 
fall and decay ; the murmuring Cedron shall be 
hushed in the waste of its waters ; those old walls, 
with all their lofty turrets, shall be broken down. 
That proud temple, rising in gorgeous splendor from 
the edge of yon beetling precipice, shall perish in 
the destroying flames; over the holy city begins to 
brood the wrath of the Almighty, which, erelong, 
bursting like the thunder-cloud, shall overwhelm it 
as with a flood, and its glory shall be like the " early 
dew which passeth away " ; but the remembrance of 
this night of suffering shall live forever ; and the 
prayers that have echoed in its w^oocl, the tears that 
have fallen on its flowers, the agony that has called 
down angels to consecrate its shaded walks, shall 
forever embalm in the hearts of the followers of the 
blessed Jesus the hallowed name of Gethsemane. 



CHRIST CRUCIFIED. 



"Ought not Christ to have suffered these things? " — Luke xxiv, 26. 

In our first discourse on these words we attempted 
to trace our Lord through his career of suffering, 
dwelling particularly upon his agony in the garden. 
We saw him then the prey of his own feelings. His 
anguish was occasioned by internal causes, and the 
pains that prostrated his body flowed from the acute 
mental distress that had fastened on his spirit. Our 
Lord's physical sufferings were the ordained counter- 
part, and in a sense the necessary condition of his 
mental anguish, while this last was, in the same 
manner, the counterpart and condition of the former. 
The cruel tortures of his body, the preparations for 
his death, everything served to remind him of the 
awful position he occupied as a victim atoning for 
the sins of others ; while the fearful pangs of his soul 
were the constant monitors of the extreme sufferings 
that should be let loose upon his body, making every 
vein a passageway for the wormwood and the gall to 
be poured into his heart. Thus were his mind and 
body continually acting and reacting on each other, 
giving the greatest possible intensity to those pangs 
that made his last days the bitterest that Gocl or man 



CHRIST CRUCIFIED. 121 

ever knew, and on the cross wrung out his heart in a 
death to which no parallel can be found, anomalous, 
as we have reason to believe, in the whole circle of 
history, and, like his birth, miraculous and divine. 
We saw Jesus Christ captured as a common male- 
factor, by a set of men obviously bought up for the 
occasion. This is not all, he was taken in midnight 
darkness. Now place these two facts together, and 
they read us a whole volume of significance. Jerusa- 
lem was at that time thronging with visitors, assem- 
bled at the great annual festival of the Passover, and 
there is no doubt that many had come expressly to 
see and hear the Mighty Teacher whose fame filled 
the land. And could we have been present at the 
secret conclave of priests and doctors, who felt their 
influence over the multitude leaving the long fringes 
and broad hems of their garments, could we have 
heard their plotting together, we would have listened 
to such language as this : " We must not wait until 
morning lest the people come upon us and stone us ; 
we must hire a mob to steal him away under the 
cover of darkness, and before morning- we must pass 
him into the hands of the Romans." We are now to 
behold Jesus before the high-priest ; and what may 
we expect for him there ? If his accusers were polit- 
ical despots, we might hope for his safety ; but the 
history of mankind has taught us that religious tyrants, 
trampling on the sacred rights of humanity in the 
name of God, are the worst autocrats that ever 
belched forth persecution on the pure heart and meek 
head of suffering innocence. He who crushes the 



122 CHRIST CRUCIFIED. 

cause of truth and justice in his own name, does it at 
the peril of being condemned at a higher tribunal 
than his own ; but he who sheds virtuous blood under 
the awful sanctions of religion, stands alone in unap- 
proachable power. A Pontius Pilate would have 
saved the Son of God, but the priests of a national 
religion thirsted for his blood. 

The morning now begins to advance ; a thin and 
narrow streak of light arches over the summits of the 
eastern hills, and a few dim, gray rays are seen 
trembling through the misty streets of the great city. 
It is that period of profoundest silence when all 
nature seems to be gathering strength for a new 
resurrection. The paschal lamb is to be sacrificed; 
and on this day a universal sacrifice is to be offered 
up for sin. At this early hour Jesus Christ is led 
by his persecutors bef >re the judgment-seat of the 
Roman governor ; this hasty movement is designed 
to anticipate the difficulties that would arise were the 
Great Teacher to be publicly condemned before the 
vast populace of the city. Pilate goes through with 
.a rapid examination of the prisoner, and by his 
manly bearing and courteous civility, in strong con- 
trast with the behavior of the high-priests, secures 
to all his questions the most satisfactory answers. 
He is convinced of the innocence of the man before 
him and declares his honest conviction of the prison- 
er's faultlessuess ; but the infuriate mob cry out, 
" Give us Barabbas." 

Pilate retires into the judgment-hall. We can 
only guess at the emotions that must throb in his 



CHRIST CRUCIFIED. 123 

heart now, compelled to decide between two courses 
of action, each equally, perhaps, repugnant to his 
feelings ; he must become the murderer of an innocent 
man, or he must involve himself in the enmity of 
the national priests, whose good-will is absolutely 
necessary to the quiet and repose of his govern- 
ment. He will make one more effort. He goes out 
to the rabble and warmly testifies his full persuasion 
of Christ's entire innocence and the utter injustice 
that would attend his condemnation. The mob 
drown his voice with a cry of, " Crucify him, crucify 
him." Pilate again returns to the hall, and, as if to 
seek even a paltry excuse under the shadow of which 
to condemn him, presses his questions still more 
closely upon the Saviour. But the calm and dispas- 
sionate answers he receives, the meek dignity that 
invests his presence with a winning charm, penetrate 
the stout Roman's heart, and tell him more power- 
fully than words that the blessed Jesus is a wronged 
and abused sufferer. 

One more expedient remains : Christ is a Galilean, 
and rightly belongs to the jurisdiction of Herod, the 
tetrarch of that province. Pilate will throw off the 
responsibility of his condemnation on Herod. Herod 
is not unwilling to have this case referred to him ; for 
a long time he has been exceedingly desirous for a 
sight of the man whose astonishing works have filled 
the land with his fame. He makes but few inquiries 
respecting the charges alleged against him, and cares 
not in the least which way the affair terminates, but 
he craves a miracle. His whole soul is intent on 



124 CHRIST CRUCIFIED. 

this one thing. He begs, he promises, he threatens, 
he insults, he natters, he storms ; but Christ never 
wrought a miracle to satisfy curiosity, and he does 
not deign to take any notice of Herod's importunate 
demands. That prince will give himself but little 
more trouble ; and so, as if to turn the whole matter 
into a farce, he calls in half a score of soldiers and 
orders them to dress up Jesus in a gorgeous purple 
robe and entwine his brow with a wreath of the thorn, 
whose leaves, resembling those of the ivy that emper- 
ors are accustomed to wear, seem to reflect calumny 
upon him, and whose sharp spines, turned inward 
and piercing through the flesh, produce the most 
fearful wounds ; and in this mock apparel, with a 
rabble of profligate wretches behind him, and a crowd 
of merciless priests kneeling before him, and with 
tantalizing obsequiousness saluting him, "Hail, King 
of the Jews," he is brought back to Pilate. We may 
well suppose that by this time the priests were at 
the very acme of excitement. They had been par- 
tially defeated in all their previous attempts, and 
now saw that a desperate effort alone could enable 
them to win the victory. We may conjecture their 
passionate entreaty, their angry menaces. Pilate 
now sees but one course along which he can steer 
his conduct, and save himself from the fearful po- 
litical dangers that will probably harass him if he 
acquit Jesus Christ. His resolution is taken. Gro- 
ing out before the people, he washes his hands to 
signify his innocence of the murder, and pronoun- 
cing the sentence of condemnation, he orders the 



CHRIST CRUCIFIED. 125 

Roman guard to scourge Jesus. They take him into 
another apartment, and there divest him of his 
apparel. Binding his hands firmly to prevent his 
struggling, they prostrate him on the floor, with his 
face downwards. The scourge is a large knotted 
rope, fastened on the end of a short rod. One of the 
soldiers takes it and proceeds to inflict the dreadful 
blows. They raise him up and put on him his own 
simple raiment. He speaks not a word, but the same 
serenity lingers in his eye, the same holy calm 
spreads over his countenance. He is now led forth 
to execution. The priests have chosen a place by 
the name of Golgotha, from its resemblance to the 
form of a skull, it being a small, conical elevation, 
near the outer wall of the city. Jesus is compelled 
to bear a portion of the cross on which he is to be 
crucified, consisting of the upright or longer piece. 
On each side of him attends a strong division of the 
Roman garrison quartered in the city, and in front 
and in rear two larger companies, completely enclos- 
ing the whole body of the priests and Jewish officers, 
with their victim, march with lances already charged, 
to prevent any insurrection among the vast concourse 
that stretches far behind. 

They have but just arrived at the gate of the wall, 
when Jesus, weak from his accumulated sufferings 
and overtasked with the weight of the rugged wood, 
sinks upon the ground. One Simon, just entering 
the city, is stopped by the priests and made to assist 
the Saviour in bearing the cross. The wall is passed, 
the short distance between it and Calvary is soon 



126 CHRIST CRUCIFIED. 

gone over, and the ascent is made. The Roman 
auard wheel off in a circle around the brow of the 
hill, and rest upon their lances. The Jewish officers 
proceed to make the necessary preparations for the 
crucifixion. The piece of wood designed for the 
upright portion of the cross is taken from the shoul- 
ders of Jesus and Simon and laid on the ground. 
Another piece, about one fourth or one fifth the 
length of the former, is nailed upon it at right angles, 
leaving a short space between it and the head of the 
longer pale. Upon this cross our Saviour is now 
laid, his hands unbound and outstretched upon the 
transverse beam, and his feet resting about half-way 
the space between it and the bottom of the cross, 
the one foot being placed upon the other. A pain- 
ful operation is now to be performed. Two or three 
men kneel down to hold the Saviour in his position, 
while another takes a hammer and drives a large nail, 
or spike, directly through the palm, the teuderest 
part of each hand, and another through both his 
feet, into the solid wood. Nothing but the most 
excruciating agony can be supposed possible, as the 
result of this cruel treatment. The priests might have 
accomplished their purpose just as effectually by the 
use of ropes, instead of those spikes. But they 
seemed to be racking their ingenuity to devise means 
of torture. A hole has been dug in the centre of the 
hill, and in it the cross is now planted, with the body 
of Jesus upon it. Let us take a view of the whole 
scene. We will look to the southward and east- 
ward. The sun is hanging high in the heavens, and 



CHRIST CRUCIFIED. 127 

there is not a cloud to be seen in the whole expanse. 
Their lances glitter and flash in the light, as the sol- 
diers move to and fro, or, laying aside their pon- 
derous shields, recline upon the earth. The hill is 
gently declinous, and the side sloping towards the 
city is thronged with a vast multitude, that reaches, 
broken only at intervals, even to the gate of the wall. 
About half-way the plain is seen a small group of 
women, now gazing up the ascent, now bowing their 
heads as if in grief. A public road winds round the 
base of the hills, along which people are constantly 
passiug to the festival in the city. These generally 
stop for a few minutes, make some hurried inquiries 
of the crowd, and then pursue their way. 

On the northwest side of the hill, also, a few 
groups may be seen scattered up and down, having 
gone around to obtain a better view of the spectacle. 
Within the circle formed by the Roman guard, you 
may notice the haughty priests and Jewish officers, 
some standing, some reclining, gathered in little 
knots in front of the cross, vying with one another 
in their efforts to load the crucified man with oppro- 
brium and iusult. 

Just around the foot of the cross you behold the 
most interesting group of all. It consists of the 
relatives and friends of Jesus. There is his mother, 
her heart throbbing with anguish, such as mothers 
alone can feel, her hands, now clasped in prayer, 
now wrung in agony; and there also is John, the 
disciple whom Jesus loved so tenderly, who was 
wont to recline upon his bosom, and who was 



158 



CHRIST CRUCIFIED. 



honored with his confidence above the rest of the 
chosen few. These friends have experienced some 
humanity from the guard, and been by them per- 
mitted thus to watch near the cross. 

Now let us cast our eyes upon the Saviour himself. 
The sight of one dying as a malefactor is anything 
but pleasing, even when we know he merits his 
doom. 

It is hard for friends to watch the fading eye, the 
quivering lip, of one departing from this life in the 
ordinary way by disease ; especially do we feel a 
poignant sorrow when we stand by the death-bed of 
one in the bloom and freshness of youth or the 
vigorous prime of manhood. But when we witness 
the forcible cutting asunder of the bands of life, the 
compulsive separation of a human being from all the 
joys and happiness that sweetened his mortal exist- 
ence, it is scarcely possible for us to choke down an 
almost involuntary expression, that, after all, human 
justice is a dreadful thing. But to behold innocence 
torn from the budding sympathies of friendship 
before its natural time, Oh, this is the hardest, the 
most heart-rending of all ! Behold the Saviour. 
He is in the very prime of life. It is at this, the 
most interesting portion of his life, that the Saviour 
is to die. His head is bowed and his eyes closed, 
save when he looks down upon his weeping mother 
and her friends. The posture of his body is a most 
painful one. You remember that, but a short time 
ago, he was prostrated in the garden under a sense of 
mental anguish, altogether too acute for his physical 



CHRIST CRUCIFIED. 129 

endurance. You remember that, from that time to 
the present moment, he has been deprived of all 
repose and nourishment, and been exposed to the 
most cruel treatment. 

You can imagine then how intense must be his suf- 
ferings in body, when to all these last-mentioned 
pains and fatigues, and buffetings and scourgings, 
you add his present dreadful anguish, occasioned by 
his crucifixion. But his mental distresses are the 
most terrible of all. He is meeting death and hell, 
and alone on that cross, achieving, by his pangs, the 
possible salvation of all mankind. He is attempting 
alone, what ages have given up in despair ; and though 
his hands are nailed and his heart is breaking, he is 
seizing humanity on the brink of woe, and bringing 
it back to God ! He is a Lamb without spot or blem- 
ish, bleeding and sacrificed, and consumed on the 
altar, amid enkindling wrath, that is gathered up by 
the avenging hand of justice and flung upon the 
vicarious sufferer. 

What thoughts are now rushing upon his mind. 
A few more hours and all prophecy pertaining to him 
will have been verified. Salvation will have been 
provided. Heaven will break forth into new songs 
of rejoicing ; hell will be appalled with new terrors ; 
death and the grave will feel their massive bars give 
way, and from the ruins of our poor race will spring 
up a kingdom that shall not pass away, a dominion 
that shall have no end. Well does the Saviour know 
the import of those words, "And on him shall be laid 
the iniquities of us all." He is now feeling the curse 



130 CHRIST CRUCIFIED. 

of his Father. He has assumed the guilt of the sin- 
ner, and now he must bear his woe. God is about 
to strike him with his tremendous hand. The Saviour 
thirsts. The j dip a sponge fastened on a stick of 
hyssop, into a vessel filled with sour wine, the ordi- 
nary drink of the Koman soldiers, and raise it to his 
lips. His hour is now come. A strange pallor over- 
spreads his countenance. He looks down upon his 
friends at the foot of the cross, and speaks a few 
words to them in a low, tremulous tone, and then 
raising his head, he lifts his voice and prays, "Father, 
forgive them, for they know not what they do." 
The old soldiers were moved when they heard this 
fervent prayer ; and well might they be, for cast your 
eye to the sun, man never saw such darkness coming 
on at such an hour. The disk of the sun is barely 
visible, looking like an ash-heap in the midst of 
mournful gloom. The old soldiers look affrighted, 
they hover together more closely. The circle that 
stretched around the hill is broken, and many of the 
multitude on its sides press up close to the summit. 
The priests all gather together near the cross, now 
looking anxiously up into the blackened sky, and 
now watching the convulsions that begin to shake the 
fragile form above them. Look down towards the 
city. You can just behold a section of the w T all, and 
a few of the most lofty edifices that rise directly in 
the rear of it. That vast crowd that filled the plain 
is now half hidden in the misty dimness, but you 
can see many hastening towards the city as if in 
great fear. Strange news is brought by a messenger 
hat has just come from the festival. 



CHRIST CRUCIFIED. 131 

He says the great veil, that hangs before the holy 
of holies in the temple, has been rent from top to 
bottom. The Jews are tilled with absolute conster- 
nation. Many of the priests, under an escort of the 
Roman soldiers, go back in great haste to the city. 
In the mean time the darkness has increased so much 
that but a small circle around the cross is directly 
visible. 

Jesus has not spoken for the last half-hour. His 
head is now up, leaning against the long pale of 
the cross. His eyes are open and turned up. His 
brow, covered with the crimson drops that flow from 
the punctures of the plaited thorns, is knit with pain. 
His lips are firmly compressed; and you may notice 
a tremor quivering over his body. Is he conscious 
of the stupendous miracle now throwing a dark pall 
over the face of nature, and sinking upon the hearts 
of men like the ghost of despair? Ah ! he feels the 
pains of hell taking hold on his heart. He is utterly 
{done. God, his Father, has abandoned him. The 
angels, that w T ere wont to render homage, have hid 
their faces. Heaven is closed to his vision. This 
sense of deserted loneliness, added to that mental 
depression which is the consequence of intense bodily 
suffering, is too much for his soul to bear. He makes 
a struggle. His whole frame shudders with agony. 
. He opens his lips, and in a hollow, wailing tone that 
makes every head bow down, he cries aloud, "My 
God ! my God ! why hast thou forsaken me ! " His 
mother looks up with anguish too deep for tears. 
The Saviour is dying now. His eyes are fixed and 



132 CHRIST CRUCIFIED. 

his lips quiver. Perhaps he is still praying. An- 
other fearful struggle; a loud cry, "It is finished!'' 

His head drops down, his spirit leaves the clay 
tenement ; the Saviour is dead ! Was it some fear- 
ful crash in the air, some sudden rending of the 
rocks, that made the multitude shriek? Listen to 
the astonished centurion who commanded the guard : 
" Certainly this was a righteous man. Truly this was 
the Son of God." And away on the plains of Egypt, 
a philosopher of Athens, beholding the unnatural 
gloom that hid the sun and overspread the sky, ex- 
claimed, " Either the God of nature is suffering or 
Nature herself is dissolving ! " 

Eighteen hundred years have rolled away since 
these scenes were witnessed. During that lapse of 
time, how vast the throng of those who have passed 
to heaven by their faith in that cross ! Again we 
plant that cross before you and cry, " Behold the 
Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the 
world." 



CHRIST EISEN. 



11 Wluj seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is 
risen" — Luke xxiv, 5, 6. 

Jesus had died. His sufferings, so numerous and 
intense, and protracted for many years in the midst 
of a scoffing nation, had now ended. The sacrifice 
for universal sin, "the Lamb of God, without spot 
or blemish," had been laid on the altar, and con- 
sumed. The great work of the incarnation, that 
comprehensive purpose for which the incarnation was 
necessary, had been accomplished. The bonds which 
had so long fastened the Divine Spirit to its tenement 
of clay had been stricken away by the iron hand of 
death. Over the darkened multitudes that drooped 
their heads in that fearful hour, had broken the groan 
of the parting spirit, when the last inspiration had 
ceased to warm the quivering flesh. The cry, "It is 
finished," had smitten through their hearts like an 
arrow from the bow of the Almighty, and the har- 
dened priest, the incensed ruler, the malicious scribe, 
were pierced with the keen pangs of a strange fore- 
boding, a bitter fear that their bloody deed had 
gone up to heaven, to cry for chastising vengeance. 
In the hearts of the disciples and friends and rela- 
6 



134 CHRIST RISEN. 

tives of the Saviour dwelt the deepest sorrow. With 
moistened eyes they looked upon the lifeless body of 
Him who had cherished them with the tenderest love, 
soothed their cares and trials, lifted their thoughts 
upon his high instructions, purified their souls with 
the breath of truth, opened their eyes to see and their 
ears to hear the things into which angels had desired 
to look and prophets to inquire ; of him who had 
healed their maladies and softened their pains, had 
brought health to their dying sick and recalled their 
dead from the grave, had lodged under their roofs 
and eaten at their tables, and closely entwined about 
their hearts the sweet sympathies of a long and most 
intimate friendship. IN or was their grief mitigated 
by any strong assurance that their beloved Master 
would again appear to them ; that he would break 
the bars of death, come forth from the enclosure of 
the tomb, and, by his corporeal presence, prove the 
divinity of his character and mission, and establish 
their hearts in unwavering faith. 

They grieve as those without hope. The precious 
remembrances of his sweet discourse concerning the 
Comforter whom he was to send, and the ultimate 
triumphs of his religion over his enemies, were now 
crowded out by the overpowering spectacle before 
them. Their apprehensions of Christ's doctrines had 
always been more or less physical. They had confi- 
dently trusted that he would sit on the throne of 
regal power, girt with the majesty of an earthly con- 
queror, having broken the Koman yoke from the 
neck of Judaea, and restored the shivered power and 



CHRIST RISEN. 135 

faded splendor of the theocracy. With such expec- 
tations they had followed him for years, and although 
their zeal to hurry on the consummation of this 
grand achievement had often been repressed by the 
spiritual interpretations of Christ, yet their under- 
standings remained dark ; they knew not the necessity 
that was laid on Christ, were unable to appreciate 
either the character or the objects of his death ; and 
when they saw him nailed to the cross, trembling in 
the grasp of his foes, agonizing under a fearful load 
that weighed upon his heart, and at last yielding up 
his life, perhaps then every fond trust in him as a 
Saviour was torn from them, their belief was chilled, 
and their bosoms were agitated by contending doubts 
that gave increased bitterness to their sorrow, and 
drove into their longing hearts the pangs of utter 
desolate ness. 

How sad, and to a mind too contracted to take in 
the wide scheme of sacrificial mercy, how dispiriting 
the sight of the Saviour dead ! Where now is the 
power that broke asunder the bands of death, and 
snatched the dead from the devouring grave ? Where 
now is the voice that fell like an echo from God on 
the ears of the charmed multitude, woke up senti- 
ments of divinest beauty in the stifled hearts of the 
poor, and made those hearts feel the pulse of invigo- 
rated life, and expand beneath the mighty presence 
of truth ; the voice that glided soothingly over the 
bosom of agitated nature, and lulled to quiet the 
storm - tossed waves of Tiberias ; the voice that 
pierced the hypocrite with keenest mortification, shot 



136 CHRIST RTSEN. 

trouble and anguish into the soul of the ungodly, yet 
whispered the softest strains of consolation to the 
penitent and breaved? Where is the expression of 
that all-meaning eye, flashing in rebuke or beaming 
the mildest lustre of winning love ? Where now the 
scheme which has been ripening for years ? Where 
is the promised salvation, where the rich emancipa- 
tion expected so eagerly and waited for so longingly? 
Alas ! the right hand of power is nailed to the 
accursed wood, shorn of its strength ; the tongue is 
cold and stiff, and its eloquence has ceased to kindle ; 
the eye is pressed by an icy finger, and its look is 
fixed and vacant. How utterly prostrate in hope are 
the poor disciples. How bitterly they feel when the 
cold and heartless jest and Pharisaic sneer are thrown 
in their faces. How they are stung by the insensate 
cavil, "He saved others: himself he cannot save." 
But is the Saviour really dead? He has hung on 
the cross but about six hours at the longest, and 
ordinarily those who are crucified survive for days, 
three, four, and even nine days. There seems to be 
a doubt in the minds of the multitude as to his death, 
and in order to ascertain whether he is, or is not, life- 
less, a soldier thrusts the point of his spear into his 
side. There is no struggle, no paroxysm; and from 
the puncture there flow out mingled blood and water. 
Whatever we may urge in explanation of this fact, 
there can be no doubt that it gives every appearance 
of the death of the Saviour. The Jews were satisfied 
of it ; and when they hastened the death of the two 
thieves by breaking their limbs, they passed by the 



CHRIST RISEN. 137 

body of the Saviour, knowing that he was already 
lifeless. 

Nioht begins now to clothe the earth with her 
dusky robes. The multitude silently, one after 
another, depart. The disciples linger awhile in the 
distance, loath to leave, then take one farewell look 
at the body of their Lord, and with hearts sadly 
oppressed, turn their footsteps to their desolate 
abodes in the city. The fear of their adversaries, 
a bitter sense of their forsaken condition, and the 
remembrance of the dangers through which they 
have passed, restrain them from seeking to pay 
the last tribute of love to the Eedeemer in con- 
signing his body to the tomb. Besides, there is 
for him no honorable burial. As a malefactor 
he has died, and therefore his body, like that of a 
malefactor, is condemned to be thrown into "the 
place of skulls," the accursed valley of Hinnom. 
When he was alive, the Saviour had not where to lay 
his head, and on the desert he made his bed of the 
harsh sands, and was wet with the dews of the chill 
night. Poor in his life, subjected to the commonest 
hardships, pierced w T ith bodily pangs, and enduring all 
"the ills that flesh is heir to," even in his death he 
was doomed to the most bitter poverty. But God 
had purposed to stop the counsels of hypocritical 
priests and scribes, to set in motion an order ot 
events out of which should spring, with palpable cer- 
tainty, a great and grand demonstration of his power. 

Christ was to rise from the dead, and in his res- 
urrection to shake the dominion of the grave, to sow 



138 CHRIST RISEN. 

the germ of immortality in the coffined clay of every 
mortal, and to people the dark and pathless desert of 
death with radiant hopes that like spirits should 
hover about the dying, and on the departing soul 
flash the morning beam of life's "eternal day." Had 
the body of the Saviour been thrown into the com- 
mon receptacle of dead malefactors, had the Re- 
deemer risen from the sleep of death amid the dry 
bones in the lonely valley of Tophet, where then 
would have been that bright chain of evidences on 
which now hangs our belief in his resurrection? 
Many a precious link would have been wanting, and 
although enough would undoubtedly have been fur- 
nished to satisfy even narrow-minded incredulity, yet 
there would have been less force in the testimony, 
less harmony in the concurrence of events, and less 
of that almost romantic interest which pervades the 
history of the Saviour's sepulchral repose, guarded 
by white- winged seraphs, the rolling back of the 
stone, and his thrilling interview with Mary. 

One of Christ's disciples, an honorable counsellor, 
probably a senator in the Jewish sanhedrin, the 
supreme legislative, judicial, and executive power 
among the Jews, went to Pilate and begged the body 
of Jesus. His request was granted. The rich coun- 
sellor, who thus coveted the privilege of rendering to 
the body of his Lord the last tribute of his affection, 
had a costly tomb hewn out of the solid rock, in a 
garden near the place of crucifixion, a sepulchre into 
which no man had ever beenl aid. The Oriental 
sepulchre possesses a romantic attraction which makes 



CHRIST RISEN 1 . 139 

the house of the slumbering dead a place of quiet 
loneliness, breathing the sweetest thoughts, and ting- 
ing the sadness of bereaved friendship with a feeling 
not altogether unlike a sober delight and joy. You 
roll back the stone slab that covers the entrance and 
there view the embalmed bodies of the loved and 
lost, laid upon shelves, projecting one above another, 
on two or three sides of the crypt, or placed in 
small niches cut in the same manner. Or perhaps 
you descend by a flight of stairs hewn out of the rock, 
and stand in a spacious chamber, with its walls not 
inelegantly carved into fantastic figures, and its solid 
floor made smooth as a pavement of glass. Perhaps 
from this chamber you descend by another flight of 
stairs into another more remote, and un illumined save 
by the light you carry in your hand. From this you 
may enter another still more distant, until you stand 
beneath the very ridge of a mountain, in the heart of 
a vast pile of limestone or sandstone, surrounded 
with the dead of past generations, whose clay is still 
uncrumbled by the touch of time. The sepulchre of 
Joseph, the senator, undoubtedly consisted of a soli- 
tary chamber, the entrance into which was by a flight 
of stairs cut in the rock, and along the sides of which 
might have been excavated several niches ranged one 
above another. At the entrance was placed a massive 
stone slab, "probably made to turn in a correspond- 
ing portion of the rock" in the manner of a door. 
Assisted by Mcodemus, the ruler who came to Jesus 
by night and interrogated him respecting his doctrine, 
Joseph takes down the body from the cross, embalms 



140 CHRIST RISEN. 

it with costly spices, wraps it in fine linen, covering 
the head with a napkin, and lays it in the tomb. At 
the request of the rulers, Pilate grants them a guard, 
probably, at least, four quaternions of Roman sol- 
diers. The stone is rolled to the entrance of the 
sepulchre, fastened securely, and sealed. The watch 
are stationed about the place, bold and dauntless 
men, keenly alive to every sight and sound. With 
such men to guard it, the body of the Crucified must 
surely be safe from the designs of friends and foes. 
No man will venture to attack that guard or break 
with treasonous hand that inviolable seal. 

But we may now pause to ask, Where are the poor, 
forlorn disciples ? It is the Sabbath, the first of the 
festival of the Passover. - The temple is crowded with 
a vast multitude, attending the sacrifices and paying 
their devotions. Search through the press, but you 
will not find the disciples. Every synagogue is 
thronged, but the disciples are not in the synagogue ; 
and little thinks the haughty priest that now no more 
the smoke of the sacrifice is pleasing to Jehovah ; 
hovers no longer over the reeking altar the angel of 
the covenant ; shines no more the bright shekinah, 
the symbol of the Divine presence. That proud 
temple is abandoned ; on its magnificent columns 
and burnished dome the finger of wrath has written, 
"Thy glory is departed." The last acceptable sacri- 
fice, the great atonement, was made yesterday beneath 
the frowning sky, in the person of Jesus Christ. A 
dark cloud of retribution is gathering over the de- 
voted city, and within its black folds slumbers the 



CHRIST RISEN. 141 

bolt that is to dash clown its walls and palaces, its 
synagogues and temples. How richly swells on the 
still air the anthem of praise, from the halls and 
porches of the temple, and floating in echo along the 
valley of the Cedron, waking a response from the 
lonely Olivet, and answered back from a thousand 
rocks and deep recesses ! Soon shall those green 
slopes, reposing now so quietly in sunshine and 
shadow, be trodden by the foot of the soldiers. 
Those rocks shall echo the truinpet-pealing notes of 
war ; that stream shall be mingled with blood ; and 
from that temple shall break the wail of woe from 
the lips of thousands stifled in the enwrapping flames. 

In an obscure part of the city, in an upper room, the 
disciples had been passing the Sabbath, distracted 
with grief, and doubt, and fear, anxiety in their 
faces, trouble in their eyes ; every breath is a sigh, 
and every heart-throb a pang. They have taken 
their purpose ; they have determined to go back to 
their old mode of life ; again will they drag the net 
in the waters of Galilee, and strive to bury in its 
liquid depths the remembrance of their three years 
of hope and trust in their fated Master, and the 
crushing weight of woe which has extinguished it in 
ruin. 

Let us visit now the sepulchre. It is the hour 
before dawn, and the shadows lie dark on the ground, 
and move in thick masses amonsf the trees that rise 
about the tomb. All is quiet, save perhaps a faint 
murmur of the wind stirring the leaves, and whisper- 
ing in soft echoes from the jagged rocks. Undoubt- 

6* 



142 CHRIST RISEN. 

edly the watch are awake ; perhaps reclining on the 
ground, noting any hostile approach, yet ready to 
spring in an instant upon any rude assaulter of the 
sepulchre. Behold, a light is seen in the depths of 
the overhanging night, a white, brilliant cloud, sail- 
ing through the ethereal sea. Nearer and nearer 
it comes, flinging its dazzling whiteness on the tops 
of the trees, tipping the soldiers' spears with silver, 
and showing in clear outlines the rock that incloses 
the sepulchre. Look at that strange appearance 
again, and you can discern the form of a seraph, with 
his white wings waving gently yet swiftly, his coun- 
tenance glowing with a reflection from God, and his 
hands folded in majesty. The guard look once, and 
then turn their faces away in dismay and affright. 
They attempt to rise and flee, but lo ! their limbs 
relax, and they sink heavily upon the ground. The 
angel now alights and stands at the sepulchre. The 
air is radiant around his head, and the halo paints 
itself upon the door of the tomb. The path along 
which he has bent his flight is still to be seen, and, 
far as the eye can reach, is thronged with an innu- 
merable company of spirits, moving up and down as 
of old in the vision of the patriarch, when he slept 
by night on the earth at Bethel. Heaven is sympa- 
thizing with the body of the Redeemer, and it is now 
to come forth from its silence and repose. The 
angel breaks the seal and rolls back the heavy stone. 
There lies the body as it was laid by Joseph, wrapped 
in linen, and the napkin on its head. The angel 
enters and disrobes it. For a moment he regards the 



CHRIST RISEN. 143 

composed features, views the prints of the braided 
thorns, the spear and the nails, and then, stooping, 
touches the closed eyes, and they open; the lips, and 
they move. The Saviour breathes. The angel rises, 
and coming forth from the sepulchre, to the nearest 
seraph whispers, " He lives." To the next the whis- 
per passes, "He lives." Up it is borne along that 
line of rejoicing seraphs, " He lives." The guard 
hear it, and tremulously murmur, " He lives." The 
whole multitude of spirits shout, "He lives." And 
the choir of heaven, striking their harps to the loftiest 
measure, sing in full symphony, "He lives." Then, 
unfolding their radiant wings, back to heaven they 
fly, singing in melodious concert the song that shall 
gush from the lips of the redeemed forever, " Hosanna 
in the highest ! Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, to 
receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, 
and honor, and blessing." 

" And did He rise ? Hear, O ye nations ! Hear 
it, O ye dead ! He rose. He rose. He burst the 
bars of death, and triumphed o'er the tomb ! Then, 
then, I rose, then first humanity, triumphant, passed 
the crystal posts of life, and seized eternal youth ! " 



BOWING IN THE HOUSE OF RIMMON. 



' ' In this thing the Lord pardon thy servant, that when my master 
goeth into the house of Simmon to worship there, and he leaneth 
on my hand, and I bow myself in the house of Simmon ; when 
I bow down myself in the house of Simmon, the Lord pardon 
thy servant in this thing." — 2 Kings v, 18. 

It is easy for us to read the character of Naaman 
in the story of his cure by Elisha. He shows so 
much pride, haughty self-sufficieucy, and aristocratic- 
obstinacy, that we can readily believe nothing but the 
desperate nature of his terrible disease would ever 
have brought him to apply to the great prophet. 
The national feeling of the surrounding peoples to- 
ward the Jews seems to have anticipated, even then, 
the contempt and aversion felt for them almost uni- 
versally in later times ; and that high disdain was 
likely to appear with especial virulence in so lofty a 
station as that held by Naaman in the court of 
Syria. Naaman shows it at the very start. He 
evidently thinks that he is conferring too great an 
honor on the petty kingdom of Israel by his lordly 
condescension in asking a boon. 

He is used, in his own country, to order the idol- 
atrous priests and prophets, and command the officers 
of religion just as he pleases, and he knows no differ- 



BOWING IN THE HOUSE OF RIMMON. 145 

once between them, and the servants and service of 
Jehovah. He supposes that his only suit will lie at 
the door of the king of Israel, and he carries a royal 
letter of introduction to him, so stern and imperative 
in its style, that the Israelite king is fairly bewil- 
dered and terrified by it, and exclaims, "Am I God 
that this man doth send unto me to recover a man 
of his leprosy ? " 

At length Naaman is made to understand that he 
must carry his petition to Elisha. He goes to him 
with great pomp, and waits at the door in expecta- 
tion of a most flattering reception. But he has found 
a match in the prophet. The king may tremble, but 
there is no weakness in the joints of Elisha. There 
are armies behind the back of this proud Syrian, and 
the fate of Israel may seem to hang upon his master's 
nod ; but Elisha has that noble calmness of a great 
career and a divine cause, which is insensible to fear, 
and knows no difference between the prince and the 
beggar. When John Knox was laid in his grave, 
the Earl of Morton approached it and pronounced 
his funeral oration in these simple words, "There lies 
one who never feared the face of man." This spirit 
of indifference to all the personal or material conse- 
quences of an act of unquestioned duty, this central- 
ization of the heart in the truth and the claims of an 
honored mission, though it sometimes looks like pride 
and wears the rigid features of an arbitrary and 
almost despotic will, is yet found in the best and the 
humblest reformers, in the characters of the poor 
fishermen of Galilee, when they became the ap sties 



146 BOWING IN THE HOUSE OF RIMMON. 

of the Lord Jesus, in the prototype of national de- 
liverers, Moses, and most conspicuously in those 
sharpest, severest, most statue-like impersonations of 
the prophetic ideal, Elijah and Elisha. 

Elisha does not stir from his place at the summons 
of Naaman. He has received orders, and he now 
takes his turn at giving orders, and sends out his 
directions to the Syrian general as he might have 
done to the most wretched outcast in the land. Naa- 
man is angry. He wanted his dignity anointed with 
servile complaisance; He wanted his precious time 
consulted by the most expeditious process within 
reach of the prophet's power. There is something 
mean and humiliating in going down to bathe in the 

O Co 

Jordan, and he actually hesitates, as if he were 
balancing the question between washing away his 
pride and washing away his leprosy, and pride 
almost conquers disgust at his disease. 

But at length he is persuaded to make the experi- 
ment ; and then, when the joy he feels at his recovery, 
and the flush and glow of restored health, make him 
sensible what a wonderful cure has been wrought, he 
seems to awake, for the first time, to an honest and 
hearty conviction, that he stands in the presence of a 
power such as never graced the fanes or spake through 
the lips of his ancestral idols ; and he exclaims in this 
moment of ardor, " Behold, now I know that there is 
no God in all the earth but in Israel," and he pledges 
himself, to " ofTer henceforth neither burnt offerings 
nor sacrifice to other but unto the Lord." 

But now we see the typical character of the man. 



BOWING- IN THE HOUSE OF RIMMON. 147 

Perhaps it would have been asking too much of Naa- 
man, that he should ripen, in an hour, from a blind 
idolater, into a thorough, intelligent, self renouncing 
convert to the Lord. Perhaps he had gone now as 
far as could reasonably be expected. But one thing 
is certain, he himself did not think he had gone, or 
indeed that he could go, quite as far as his convictions 
would carry him. He thought of his distinguished 
position as the honored confidant of his master. He 
thought of his wealth and power as the head of the 
Syrian army. Could he resign these to satisfy his 
conscience? When his mas er went into the temple 
of his idol, leaning on his arm, his official duty 
required him to take part in his master's worship, to 
bow when he bowed, and thus pay equal homage to 
the vain emblem of divinity enthroned before them. 
If he refused to do this, his offices were in jeopardy, 
and his head unsafe upon his shoulders. Must he 
really carry his renunciation to such a length ? Was 
there no middle term, no mode of adjusting his new 
faith to his old place and dignity ? He seems to 
think there is. He believes that it will be quite 
enough for him to withhold the burnt offerings, and 
that then it cannot matter, if he keeps back the 
substance of devotion, how many times he makes 
his courtly bow to the idol-majesty of Eiinmon. 
And so he adds, "In this thing the Lord pardon 
thy servant, that when my master goeth into the 
house of Rimmon to worship there, and he leaneth 
on my hand, and I bow myself in the house of 
Rimmon, when I bow down myself in the house 



148 BOWING IN THE HOUSE OF RIMMON. 

of Rimmon, the Lord pardon thy servant in this 
thing." I believe it is commonly thought, that this 
evasive and dexterous double-dealing obtained the 
sanction of the prophet ; but there is no word 
implying any such sanction. The prophet simply 
dismisses him with the formal words, "Go in peace," 
which, if they imply no censure, do not contain any 
distinct approbation. Elisha could cure the leprosy, 
but he knew no art to heal the tainted temper of 
Naaman; and if he looked upon the vice of his 
worldly and politic mind as beyond all hope of 
immediate correction, he would probaby have dis- 
missed him, as he did, with no more words than 
those which common courtesy required. 

The Bible never takes the edge off the moral of a 
story. It has painted Naaman just as he was, and 
has laid on the colors with evident care and pains- 
taking ; but to suppose that it approves the character 
it paints, is to believe that it holds up here to admi- 
ration a crafty sophistry, and a juggling and shuffling 
policy which it has condemned in every precept and 
on almost every page. " The Lord thy God is a jealous 
God." There is the condensation, in terms of human 
comparison, of the very spirit of God's truth and 
God's government. Jealousy does not arise at great 
and outbreaking offences, but at little, covert sus- 
picions, hints and flittings of evil. At a gross sin, 
that comes out with bold, unabashed forehead, we 
are angry, we are indignant, as it is said, "God 
is angry with the wicked every day." But when 
we discover a wavering of that love we have the 



BOWING IN THE HOUSE OF KIMMON. 149 

right to claim, when we detect the petty subterfuges 
that screen an incipient disloyalty, our jealousy is 
aroused, and we stand waiting, with fearful over- 
look, for larger and darker issues. That is just the 
attitude of God towards all half-way, half-hearted, 
double-faced subjects of his kingdom. "I would," 
says the Spirit, " that ye were either cold or hot,' 1 one 
or the other ; but any selfish, cunning, deceitful mix- 
ture of the two is just that tepid, vapid, relaxed, 
nerveless character which God condemns, and Chris- 
tian honesty cannot away with. 

I have called Naaman's character, as disclosed by 
the text, a typical character. It is the type of a 
combination of selfishness and weakness, which is as 
universal as human nature, and overcome, only when 
human nature is mastered and overcome by the grace 
of God. The spirit of Naaman is the spirit that 
troubles the church, in the inconsistencies, and va- 
cillations, and defections of Christian professors ; 
troubles the State in the party shrewdness and finesse 
and chicanery of legislators and rulers ; troubles 
society in the self-torturing artifice, and pretension, 
and worry, and parade of high life and high living ; 
and troubles the morals of business and the peace of 
honorable men, by the apparent necessities of a god- 
less rule of usage and custom. 

Consistency costs no longer blood, and stripes, 
and bondage ; but it costs what men hold, perhaps, 
as clear as their blood : it costs money, influence, 
patronage, reputation, distinction. 

There is a house of Rimmon over against every man's 



150 BOWING IX THE HOUSE OF RIMMON. 

door, and if the world is his master, he goes in there 
with the world on his arm, and bows himself down. 
Ask of many a Christian where he is to-day, and the 
answer might be, "He is in the house of Rimmon." 
He has been trying to serve two masters, and has 
ended by bowing down again at the feet of his old 
idol. Ask of many a man whose heart holds the 
truth as it is in Jesus, why he does not come out on 
the Lord's side, and the answer might well be, "He 
is like Naaman ; he does not like to break with the 
world, he is bowing down in the house of Rimmon." 
We are full of provisos that come between us and 
a faithful, determined, unswerving adhesion to our 
sense of right and our knowledge of duty. In the 
first place, we are afraid to carry out our principles 
to their just results. It is true of men and of parties 
that their creed is immeasurably in advance, not of 
their practice merely, but of their intentions and their 
objects. Policy comes in, at almost every turn, to 
cut down the too elevated standard of obligation, and 
soften and sweeten obedience with a few selfish grati- 
fications. It is difficult to persuade even a whole 
church to carry out its principles with uncompromis- 
ing impartiality. There is always some keen-eved 
brother to remind us what havoc we shall make, 
if we once draw over our delinquent members the 
sharp sword of apostolic discipline. We want a 
little license for our weak-minded brethren, who 
happen to stand high in the kingdom of Syria, and if 
they wish to bow down in the house of Rimmon, we 
are disposed to think twice before we refuse them the 



BOWING IN THE HOUSE OF RIMMON. 151 

privilege. We think a little cultivation of Rimmon 
is not bad for the church : it gives it the opportunity 
to walk in procession with the kings of money and 
the queens of fashion ; it throws the graceful garb of 
social rank over the sackcloth livery of the disciple, 
aucl it gilds the catalogue of Christian names with the 
titles of men and women who help fill the treasury, 
and give worldly consequence to the acts and minis- 
tries of the church. We are fearful of straight lines 
in morals and in discipline. 

The} r are terribly inconvenient. They carry us 
where we do not wish to go, and they lead through 
difficulties too unpleasant for a timid conscience to 
face. It is said that w r hen Napoleon began his great 
scheme of beautify iug and ventilating Paris, by open- 
ing through the densest parts of the city those fine 
boulevards which are now the boast and pride of 
Parisians, an engineer, in laying out the line of a 
street, was so much alarmed at the vast expense of 
buying up and tearing down a long row of old 
palaces and hotels, that he ventured to deviate just 
enough to avoid the obstruction, and was busy in 
regulating the angle when Baron Hausmann came 
up, and observing what he had done, exclaimed, 
" Straighten your line ; it must and shall go through, 
if I have to blow up every hotel in Paris !" We have 
a great many timid engineers in the church, who 
believe in the virtue of angles as a great saving of 
cost, and an easy method of conciliating opposition. 
They would like to spare the fine palaces, and confine 
their precise mathematics to the poor hovels and 



152 BOWING IN THE HOUSE OF MMMON. 

cottages. They stand sentinel over their own prin- 
ciples, ready to arrest them the moment they pass 
their limited beat. They are willing to sacrifice a 
little, they are loud-voiced, like Naaman, in proclama- 
tion of their conviction, but, like him, they holdfast 
one reserved right, that of bowing down, when occa- 
sion requires, in the house of Eimmon. But let us 
not think that Christians are singular in this fear of 
carrying principles out to their utmost extent. It is 
a fear that spreads through all classes, and shows 
itself sometimes in business, in politics, in legislation, 
with as many abnormal tricks of gesture and contor- 
tions of countenance, as St. Vitus' dance. It is 
almost impossible to drive the spike of a radical 
moral principle into the planks of a political plat- 
form. Our best men hesitate, the moment they see 
any danger that every hard-striking blow of the ham- 
mer will splinter the party they belong to. 

They want all the truth that is consistent with a 
good, safe majority. They are willing to push prin- 
ciple as far as they can without being pushed out of 
their own places. They believe in the Lord, but 
they think it good policy not to withdraw from the 
house of Simmon. 

In the next place, there is a very general fear to 
tell the whole truth, or trust any interest to the un- 
suspecting logic of the whole truth, unmixed with 
any human devices. We delight in compounds. We 
love to amalgamate, or try to amalgamate, positives 
and negatives, lights and shadows, metals and gases. 
We are so fearful of the result of an upright, down- 



BOWING IN THE HOUSE OF RIMMON. 153 

right, all-right, consistent spiritual architecture, that 
we make our associations, and some of our churches, 
as nondescript as many of our houses, beginning 
them in one style, and finishing them in another. 
Look at our public buildings, and you will often see 
Greece on one side, and Tuscany on the other; the 
Middle Ages in one story, looking out of a Gothic 
window, crushed down by modern France or Switzer- 
land, poised on an architectural precipice under the 
name of a roof. Just so we build up our public 
bodies, and many of our religious institutions. We 
put good, sound evangelical material into the walls, 
and then grow afraid to trust it without a little 
mortar of our own tempering. We put Christ into 
the constitution, and subscribe the by-laws in the 
name of Kirnmon. 

We do not wish to appear bigoted by standing 
up resolutely for the unadulterated truth. We do 
not wish to give offence, and peril our enterprise, 
by insisting too strongly upon unacceptable doc- 
trines. We hope to convert men by conceding half 
the difference between us and them. We will veil 
the stern face of Truth with a diplomatic smile, and 
circumvent Rimmon himself by gracious genuflec- 
tions and deferential bows. We have, in this age, 
a wonderful confidence in the rather dangerous ex- 
pedient of fighting the Devil with his own weapons. 
The apostle said, "Touch not the unclean thing " ; but 
we have a host of men who not only think it can 
safely be touched, but believe it can be brought, by 
judicious handling, into very practicable cleanliness. 



154 BOWING IN THE HOUSE OF RIMMON. 

For instance, we have, a strong sentiment against 
sensational novels as a tonic for the youthful mind. 
But the literature of the time is so overwhelmingly 
sensational, and the popular taste runs so eagerly in 
this direction, that our gravest publishing houses are 
afraid to go into the market without an appetizing 
list of novels ; and our Sunday-school societies seem 
to think, as truth is stranger than fiction, it is well 
to qualify its incredible properties by saturating it 
thoroughly in a vehicle of fiction. And so it comes 
to pass, that half the books in our Sunday-school 
libraries are as inapt, and as inane, and as worth- 
less, for any appreciable Christian influence, as the 
fables of Esop; and a child's edition of Shakespeare, 
got up in Sunday-school style, would be as defen- 
sible on moral grounds as they are. And of all our 
worshippers in the house of Rimmon, who tread 
more softly or bow more gracefully, than the pub- 
lishers and editors of many of our religious papers? 
How deftly they mix religion with romance, and give 
ui a sermon on one page fit to be read on any day, 
and a novel on another, particularly adapted to be 
read on Sunday ; and lest any man should be so un- 
compromising a precisian as to dislike this conjunc- 
tion of God and mammon in a Sunday paper, they 
put together the religious and the secular so conven- 
iently, that all he has to do is to tear the paper apart 
down the middle, and he holds the Lord in one hand 
and Rimmon in the other ; and if his conscience is a 
Sunday conscience, and particularly sensitive when 
the church bells are ringing, he has the option of 



BOWING IN THE HOUSE OF RIMMON. 155 

reserving his bow, and making bis obeisance, on some 
other day. 

Now let these specimens suffice to show the spirit 
in which we are tempted to tamper with the truth, 
and to gain by sheer policy what we are afraid we 
should lose by an open, manly, straightforward moral 
consistency. I confess that I cannot see why, if this 
policy holds good for an inch of compliance, it should 
not hold good for a yard ; why, if we may be per- 
mitted to use the Devil's darning-needle, we should 
not be allowed to use his spear and his battle-axe. 

And it is precisely because we have so much of 
this insinuating, half-wheedling, cajoling, ad-caplan- 
dum policy, in our administration of the cause of 
God ; it is because we are so diffident of success by 
the innate power of the truth, and so nervous and 
cowardly when we are called on to let out the truth 
to the whole utmost reach of the cable ; it is because 
we shrink from the apprehended social ostracism 
and political martyrdom that threaten our refusal to 
bow down in the house of Rimmon, that our preach- 
ing and our labors have less of the power of Elisha 
and Elisha's God in them, than they have of the 
chariots and horsemen of the general of Syria. 

In our wisdom the serpent has coiled himself 
around the dove, and half suffocated her ; and while 
society is full of men who believe in Jesus and wor- 
ship idols, our efforts to save the world are coming 
to have more shrewdness than earnestness, and more 
human subtlety than divine simplicity. When Prince 
Schwartzenberg was face to face with the worn-out 



156 BOWING IN THE HOUSE OF EIMMON. 

legions of Napoleon, his officers, checked by the 
mighty genius before which they stood, counselled 
delay and caution. "Let us get in their rear," said 
one; "Let us take them in flank," said another. 
" No ! " said Schwartzenberg, " let us take them with 
the bayonet" ; and they took them with the bayonet, 
and routed them. A power beyond all the bayonets 
that ever hedged armies lies in a whole-hearted 
devotion to the gospel of Jesus. Face the world 
with that; let our motto be, "The truth, the whole 
truth, without fear or favor ! " Stop trying to take 
sin in the flank, and to outwit the world by sly coun- 
termarching, and you will find that a bold, manful, 
incorruptible honesty is a force in this world which 
all men honor, and that there is more of heaven in 
the spot where an earnest man prays, and in the 
words which an earnest man speaks, than in all the 
houses of Rimmon in the land. 



PETER'S RESOLVE. 



"Peter answered and said unto him, Though all men shall be 
offended because of thee, yet will I never be offended." — Mat- 
thew xxvi, 33. 

Or all the bold, frank, open, and thoroughly 
truthful men who had the honor to be chosen the 
apostles of Jesus, Peter excelled in these qualities, 
and stood foremost by virtue of them. There were, 
among his brethren, greater abilities than his ; but it 
is not great ability alone that makes the true leader 
of men. There were more amiable and attractive 
companions ; but they are not fine, social qualities 
that men look for in stirring and dangerous times. 
Perhaps in any one trait of worth or manhood, and 
especially in the due proportion and the nicer shad- 
ings and tonings of it, Peter was surpassed by his 
brethren ; yet he stood among them primus inter 
pares, a leader by the p.erogative of nature, full of 
self-possession, though apt to let self carry him too 
far ; unquestioned in his exercise of authority, because 
he took it as a right appurtenant to him, and finally 
rising to a still loftier degree by express commission 
of his Master. 

Whenever Peter appears in the scenes of gospel 
history, it is with so plain an implication of prece- 



158 peter's resolve. 

deuce, with so evident an air of magisterial function, 
that one can easily understand the grounds of the 
tradition which has always prevailed iu the church, 
that Peter was an old man, or at least the oldest of 
all the disciples. But plainly, Peter's was one of 
thot-e minds that disdain to wait ordinary processes, 
and stride on far in advance of their years. Like 
Pitt and Bonaparte, he seems to have entered life 
full-grown, and like them, too, he had that subtle, 
indefinable charm, he was enveloped with that aura 
of magnetic virtue, which almost always attends and 
marks the real king of men, the man to whom the 
multitude give their hearts. 

Qualities crystallize differently in different men. 
They may be the same virtues, may be precisely 
equal, may be alike pure and unselfish, yet you will 
find them admiiable in one man, and unnoticed in 
another; beautiful and winning all regards in the one 
case, and in the other, homely and crude, and almost 
repulsive. Here they are crystallized under their 
fairest forms, and with clean, sharp-cut angles, and 
without a spot upon their transparent clearness ; there 
you see them iu their most awkward shapes, with un- 
seemly furrows, and of an earthy dulness and opacity. 
Some men have no power to display themselves to 
advantage. They throw the best side of their man- 
hood into shade. Of other men you see only the 
most favorable aspects ; they have the power or the 
tact to conceal every harsh or ungentle feature. 
Some men have the misfortune to discredit their own 
best qualities, by the hard, ungracious way in which 



peter's resolve. 159 

they bring them into notice. In fine, we impress 
our own individualism upon our virtues and our 
vices ; we put cur own signature to them, and stamp 
them with the facsimile of our own minds. Bearing 
nil this in view, we may well doubt whether Peter did 
not present a composition of character and qualities 
which has never been surpassed since. God made 
him for use as an apostle, and his great gifts for that 
office were often sadly out of place during his humble 
career as a fisherman. 

But we must narrow our view of Peter's character 
to that aspect in which our text presents him to us, 
rugged as the rocky shores of his beloved sea, from 
whose wateis he drew his bread, and on whose bil- 
lows, chafed by the storms, he had learned the les- 
sons of sharp, quick decision, and instant execution. 
Peter often appears to disadvantage by the side of the 
amiable and courtly disciple whom Jesus especially 
loved, 01 in compaiison with the educated Paul. He 
had been used always to speak his mind. He had 
no deep-laid scheme to brood over, like the traitor 
Judas, to make him cautious and politic in his 
speech. He was cherishing no proud ambition, to twist 
his face into hypocrite smiles, and distil honeyed 
words upon his tongue. He w r as not looking, like 
the sons of Zebedee, for a throne on the right or left 
hand of his Master. He was what God had made 
him, and he was not attempting to improve God's 
workmanship, n,or was he ashamed of it. He was 
honesty in the mass, he was candor in the lump. 
And his thought, whatever it was, had no crooked 



160 



and covert path to travel before it found his tongue ; 
it did not wait to be turned in a lathe, aud polished 
by craft, and adjusted and fitted by sophistry, before 
it could be trusted to the inspection of the world. 
It came out with an energetic leap and a dash of 
earnestness, that told it was a genuine part of the 
mind within. It might be a bad thought or a 
wrong thought, but there could never be a doubt it 
was his thought. 

With all this I suppose there was a great deal of 
unqualified selfishness in Peter. He was strong even 
in his weak points ; his nature was large, but its 
development feeble and irregular ; and out of the 
limited sphere in which he had ranged, Peter did not 
know what revulsions or what revolutions might take 
place. But he felt sure of one thing, he loved his 
Master. He loved him with the entire grasp of his 
nature. He followed Jesus for no human or earthly 
reason that could obscure or set aside this prime 
motor of his soul. Do we not suppose Jesus chose 
his disciples with a divine prevision of their future 
characters and labors as apostles? Did not Jesus 
look down iuto the hearts of these men, and see there 
what he wanted in the chief commissioner of his 
religion? If he saw there the lurking baseness and 
nascent treason of Iscariot, did he not also read in 
the souls of the others that unquenchable love and 
all-enduring constancy which have made them princes 
of the church on earth? Did he not see then in 
Peter the germs of that faithful affection which he 
recognized afterwards when Peter, trembling at the 



161 



thought of losing the place he had held in Jesus' 
regard, appealed to his omniscience, and boldly 
pleaded the Master's own testimony in his favor, 
" Thou knowest all things*: thou knowest that I love 
thee ! " 

We need not suppose that Peter's love for Jesus 
was one whit greater than that of the other disciples ; 
but it was Peter's love, and here is the whole secret 
of its character. It was the flower of his nature. It 
was the growth of a strong, quick, vigorous soil. It 
was a demonstrative love, like Peter himself, apt to 
show itself upon slight provocation, and to choose 
modes of expression peculiar to the man, and which 
did not always commend their seemliness. It was an 
officious love. When Peter heard his Master talk of 
what he was to suffer at the hands of the priests and 
scribes, his soul flamed with indignation. Impatient 
by nature and habit, he could ill brook to see his 
Master's mild submission, and to hear him talk so 
resignedly of a fate which Peter looked at as the 
most daring outrage. Why should Jesus suffer these 
things? He saw no reason. And if Jesus talked so 
patiently of enduring them, it must be that he felt 
too little confidence in the love and zeal of his dis- 
ciples. Peter did not know how it might be with 
the others, but he would let the Master know there 
was one he could depend upon. He would not stand 
by and see his Lord fall unavenged into the hands of 
his enemies ; and this is what he undertakes to assure 
Jesus of. And he puts it in a form that only too 
plainly invites comparison of himself with his breth- 



162 peter's resolve. 

ren. "Though all should be offended because of 
thee, yet will not I ! " As if he had said, You could 
not think of submitting to such indignities, if you 
trusted in your disciples. But your disciples shall 
prevent them I will show them an example myself. 
I will never see you cast helpless into the power of 
those who hate you, not if I have to stand alone, and 
fight for you single-handed ; and if the rest do not 
help me, then let them go, but I will never abandon 
you. Though all should be offended because of thee, 
yet will not 1 ! Now many seem to misapprehend 
this declaration of Peter's, and to mistake the char- 
acter of Peter as read in the light of it. Because 
Jesus replies to* him, and prophesies his coming sin 
and shame, they think Peter's declaration totally 
wrong, call his zeal into question, and condemn his 
rashness, and lower his entire character by the in- 
fluence of their judgment upon this single revalation 
of it. 

But we believe, in fact, that it was the strength of 
Peter's character, not its weakness, that challenged 
the implied censure and provoked the ordeal that 
followed. Pardon the paradox, but Peter's weakness 
here lay in his strength. His love was all that he 
professed it. His intentions were as sincere as man's 
ever were. Here was his danger. He was so sure 
of himself that he could not see his need of anything 
further, so sure of his own heart that he could not 
doubt the event. If he had been weak, naturally, if 
his had been the unstable, uncertain, effervescent tem- 
per that many infer, if Jesus had doubted the sincer- 



peter's resolve. 163 

ity of his love or the honesty of his purpose, he 
would never have subjected him to such a trial, for 
it would have ruined him. But Jesus knew that 
there was a granite foundation beneath the sand, and 
he meant only to wash away the sand. He saw that 
Peter needed a lesson in self-knowledge, and he 
taught it to him. Had there been an unsound fibre 
in Peter's attachment, that night's dark peril would 
have sapped it forever. His love seems to he 
superficial, because it lies so near the surface; but 
its roots strike down deep into the subsoil. 

We must not think that Peter's fall was a punish- 
ment. It did not happen because he had resolved it 
should not. It was not a consequence of his reso- 
lution, it was in despite of it; and Peter would 
have sinned the same, in the same circumstances, 
whether he had made this resolution or not. Jesus 
simply foretold what he saw was to take place. He 
did not ordain something to take place which other- 
wise would not have happened. We must not, then, 
look back on Peter's declaration through the sad 
gloom of his temporary baseness. We must not say 
that Peter sinned by making such a resolution. That 
was not his sin, as some seem to suppose. What 
should Peter have done? He felt all he expressed. 
His soul flamed with loyal purpose. Could not the 
Master look into that soul and see there the sincerity 
of his utterance? Why then conceal his feeling? 

There was no need of concealment. Peter needed 
to be taught discretion. He wanted more charity for 
others. He needed to tame down the energy of his 



164 



zeal. He lacked self-knowledge. There was a gross 
self-love in him which he seemed not aware of, and 
he needed to he brought face to face with it, and to 
grapple with it, and to put it beneath him forever. 
His night of treason was one of splendid victory over 
self-love. A weak man would have given all up for 
lost, and have fallen helpless and passive back into 
the ruts of his old habits. A wicked man would not 
have repented at all, but have ignored his crime or 
tried to smooth it over. But Peter was down only 
for a few moments. He was thrown thrice by the 
old wrestler, and awhile he lay, stunned and bruised ; 
but then he gathered himself up ; he rose, he struck 
back for life ; he fought hard to recover his lost 
ground, and he won it, he held it, and never lost 
an inch of it afterwards while he lived. If Peter 
went down from his honorable place as a disciple, 
into the darkness and wretchedness of that night, he 
also ro^e from them to a pinnacle loftier than that 
from which he fell. If he went down to that treason 
discrowned and disgraced, he also came up out of it 
with a more glorious crown upon his head, and with 
the palm of a victor. Some read this story and infer 
from it a general lesson against what they are pleased 
to term all rash resolutions. They call Peter's re- 
solve a rash one. " See," they say, " what is sure to 
happen to one who makes such a demonstration of 
his loyalty, and so proudly resolves to outdo all 
others in his self-sacrificing zeal. Better make no 
resolutions at all. Better just do the best you can, 
and commit yourselves by no general promises and 



peter's resolve. 165 

rash pledges." But who will show me that even 
Peter's resolution was in vain? Who will prove to 
me that it did not guide his steps to that very court 
of judgment where he so soon forgot it? But for 
that confident promise, who can say he might not 
have hid himself when the decisive hour came, or 
lacked the courage to strike off the ear of the high- 
priest's servant? Do not let us charge Peters sin to 
a cause that may have kept him from a far greater 
one. It would be a singular specific against rash 
purposes, not to form any purpose at all. 

It is a curious lesson to draw from this demonstra- 
tion of Peter's love and zeal, that it is safer not to 
make any special exhibition of love and zeal. There 
are some good men who tell us they do not make 
an open profession of faith in Christ, because they 
see so few who are able to make their professions 
good, and they feel bound, if they do ever make a 
profession, to show the world a Christian example 
very different from the one now current. For fear 
of making Peter's demonstration, they fall into the 
very spirit they condemn, and conditionally promise 
to do more and to do better than every one else. 
They will not avow any Christian purpose at all, 
because they are resolved that when they do, they 
will keep it at every hazard. These men, if they 
ever become Christians, will have a trial just like 
Peter's, a night of humiliating and mortifying defeat, 
that will teach a knowledge they are now lamentably 
deficient in. 

Men look at the truth with one eye, and then 



166 petek's resolve. 

through a distorting glass, but they look at Christian 
example with both eyes open. They are like those 
astronomers who are studying the physical constitu- 
tion of the sun. They care nothing for the sun's 
splendor, they have no admiration for its vast wrap- 
per of glowing and burning ether; but show them 
only some little rent in it through which they can 
see the dark body within it, show them some small 
spot on the sun's disk, be it ever so trifling, and at 
once they fly to their telescopes, glasses are put in 
order, eveiy thought is alert, for they hope then to 
make some discovery. The notion itself of condemn- 
ing resolutions because they are so often broken is 
absurd. Condemn all car-wheels as well, because 
they are so often broken. Resolve you will trust no 
carriage till you can be sure it will not fail you. 
Resolves and purposes are the wheels upon which our 
life advances. We have broken a great rmmy, but 
where should we have been to-day without them ? You 
condemn the rash disciple who promised so much 
and who has fulfilled so little ; but what would his 
fate have been if he had promised nothing, and feel- 
ing no responsibility and taking none, he had thrown 
his energies altogether in the other direction? Some 
of the very men who have failed most lamentably, 
like Peter, have been, like Peter, truest and most 
loyal among the disciples of Jesus. They have fallen 
deeply, because they stood so high ; they have sinned 
grievously, because they loved strongly ; they have 
had viler shame, because they had larger honor ; they 
have suffered more defeats, because they dared more 
battles and challenged more enemies. 



peter's resolve. 1(>7 

The very thing we want is resolution, Christian 
purpose, vigorous and intense determination. Of 
course we want the material of the fire first, before 
we court the flame ; we want the genuine love of 
Peter, before we have Peter's pledge of it. The 
Master was to be crucified, and no arm or power 
could prevent it. But the Master's cause is not going 
now to death, the truth is not to be crucified; and 
arms and powers are to be marshalled and set in 
array in their defence. Peter might fulfil his pledge, 
and stand by his Master to the very last, but that 
could not save him from his appointed sufferings and 
death. But the cause of the Master is to be honored 
and to be led to victory by the fulfilment of Peter's 
pledge. It needs men who are willing and resolved 
to stand by it. It calls for men whose hearts gush 
out, like Peter's, unbidden, in the spontaneous 
eagerness of their love and devotion. Better fail a 
hundred times in the noble attempt to reach and 
seize the prize, than sit down, dumb and passive, to 
hug the wretched delusion that no effort ought to be 
made till success be certain. Are we not to fight 
our battles till some divine prophet vouchsafe to tell 
us we shall conquer? Shall we never give voice to 
our love for Christ for fear we shall, like Peter, do 
something unworthy of it? Shall we lose Peter's 
glory for fear of incurring his sin and suffering his 
shame? Shall we give up his immortality of reward 
for the sake of avoiding his night of disgrace? To 
keep our characters unspotted with treason, shall we 
never swear allegiance at all? That we may not 



168 peter's res< lve. 

turn traitors, shall we refuse to carry arms? Lest 
we become rebels, shall we turn cowards, and leave 
others to fight for the truth and the right? Shall 
this lame lojnc stand between us and the Redeemer 
of our souls, this p irody of reason debar our rea- 
sonable service, this mockery of sincerity keep us 
from all honest avowal of our faith and our duty? 



THE HEAVENLY PROMISE. 



" Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will 
give you rest" — Matt, xi, 28. 

Were there ever spoken more gracious words than 
these ? And for any heart that aches and sighs under 
the oppressions of life, or carries about a secret bur- 
den of weariness and sickness, could any words fall 
more softly and soothingly than these? A great 
poet has, by a single line, touched the canker of our 
life into faithful likeness when he wrote, "Afterlife's 
fitful fever, he sleeps well." It is a fitful fever that 
burns in the selfishness and the ambition of the 
worldling. While it lasts, it keeps up his strength, 
it lends artificial vigor to his pulse, and it lulls his 
sensibilities to a deceitful sleep. But the fever has 
its intermissions, even in the hot hurry and headlong 
precipitancy of the worldling. It is chilled by dis- 
appointment, it is broken by trial, it is arrested 
by disease ; and last of all, when the icy hand of 
death hovers over the brow, and the shades of the 
future creep like a mist from the dark valley, the 
fever dies out, and leaves nothing behind but the 
tormenting sense it has blunted so long. Forgotten 
voices speak again, dead longings spring up into new 



170 THE HEAVEKLY PROMISE. 

life, the soul tosses on the uneasy couch of its old 

memories and its stinging self-reproaches, and all its 

desires are melted clown into one, all its struggles 

are turned to one passionate entreaty, and it asks, 

again and again, 

" Oh, where shall rest be found, 
Eest for the weary soul? " 

It is a thought of solemn moment, that no pain of 
the soul can be stifled. You can stupefy it, you can 
ease it with opiates, you can divert it with counter- 
irritants, but you cannot destroy it ; all your art does 
not go so far, for the suffering of the soul is only the 
consciousness of an awakened life. When a sinner 
begins to doubt the safety of his moral position, that 
doubt itself is the proclamation of his soul's great 
need, it is a whisper from God. And w T hen the soul 
has once developed this sense of a better life, when 
it acquires the capacity for moral suffering, it brings 
itself under the visible shadow of that dark de&tiny, 
"The soul that sinneth it shall die." After this, there 
is no peace for it but in the hopes of the religion of 
Christ. You may drown its cries in the tumult of 
business, you may muffle them with levity and care- 
lessness, but they will break out, in the pauses of 
life, with louder and more clamorous tones. You may 
wrap your heart with airy cheerfulness, and carry it 
along through years of thoughtlessness, without a 
twinge of pain or a shudder of fear. *But you have 
not cured the old wound ; you have not plucked the 
old sting from your soul. You awake some day, 
some day of trouble or of sorrow, and you find that 



THE HEAVENLY PROMISE. 171 

all your palliatives have lost their effect. Your soul 
rebels against them, and as it complains to you once 
more, you exclaim, "Ah! that is the old feeling I 
had years ago. I thought I had buried it in the 
world. That is the old question which harassed me 
in my youth. I dreamed I had answered it, but I 
find I have only adjourned it. My body is worn and 
wasted, my flesh is bitten into wrinkles like a leaf 
of autumn ; but my heart is as fresh as in my boy- 
hood, and it is bringing up, to distress me, a thou- 
sand things I hoped I should forget." This is the 
experience of every man who stifles, instead of 
curing, the pain of his soul. 

There is a chemical body, the fumes of which are 
sure to produce death within a few weeks, but after 
inhaling them, the victim pa-ses on with no single 
prognostic of the peril which awaits him, and no 
science could detect the evil. His heart beats as 
freely, life runs as joyously as before. But the poison 
is darkly working within him, till, all at once, symp- 
tom strikes him after symptom, like the knell of a 
funeral bell, and he is carried to his grave. It is 
just so with the poison of unrepented sin in the soul. 
You may feel no sharp reminder of it to-day, you 
may have no heaviness of heart, no weariness of 
spirit. But these things await you. The most brill- 
iant worldly success will not save you from them, 
it will but make them more unendurable. For 
success without a hearty leligion is an arch with 
no key-stone, - — it must break down under its own 
weight. One of the most successful of English 



172 THE HEAVENLY PROMISE. 

statesmen, a man who had merged himself wholly in 
the schemes of his ambition, was suddenly struck 
down by disease ; and when a bishop, an old friend 
of his, called to see him, and began to remind him 
what great things he had clone, and what singular- 
good fortune had waited upon him, he stopped him 
with a movement of impatience, and said to him, 
" Do not talk to me of that. There is a text in the 
Bible which, if I could, I would have blotted out 
years ago, and your words are only lighting it up 
with fire, * Son, remember thou, in thy liftime, 
receivedst thy good things.' " Is it not generally so 
even with the most careless devotee of this world? 
There is some text he would like to blot out that 
flashes upon him, again and again, in capital letters. 
There is some hallowed scene he would wish to for- 
get ; there is a prayer he has heard ; there are tears 
that have been shed for him ; there are sweet voices 
long hushed in death ; there are faces dim with the 
mist of time and of grief. How many things there 
are that strike through his mail of worldly hardness, 
sink into his heart, flit among the visions of his 
sleep, and make him say to his restless spirit, 
" What might I not have been if I had listened to 
the counsels of my youth ! I have turned my good 
angels into the ghosts of my folly. I have dug up 
the roots of my happiness and given them for the 
summer beauty of a few gay leaves and deceitful 
blossoms of worldly success. I have remembered 
the world, and the world will forget me. I have 
forgotten God, and how can God remember me?" 



THE HEAVENLY PROMISE. 173 

But I ask you now to consider how much labor and 
heaviness are found in the hearts of all men, hidden, 
it may he, by the gleam of prosperity, as the most 
troubled waters hide their depths when the bright 
sun glances and glitters on the surface. 

We do not proclaim to others the sadness which 
settles upon us. We could not tell all our griefs if 
we would. "Every heart knoweth its own bitter- 
ness." And here is the tender beauty of the Saviour's 
welcome to the heavy-laden. He does not say, "Ex- 
plain 3'our sorrows to me, give voice to your troubles, 
write down the history of your sufferings and your 
weariness, and I will find a cure." But He says, 
"Come to me and I will give you rest. I know what 
your burdens are ; I see the thorn that rankles in 
your 'hearts; only come to me, with your tears for 
speech, with ytur love for prayer, and I will roll off 
the burden and pluck away the thorn." Is there 
any one here who knows not Christ, without some 
buiden weighing like an iron gauntlet on his soul? 
I ask the young man of pleasure, who has bartered 
his purity and his honor for the painted charms of 
vice, and who has not strength enough to break the 
net in which he has been caught, Does he not some- 
times loathe the cup of which he drinks? Does he 
not burn with shame when he crosses the threshold 
of his home after a night of sin? Does his heart 
never ache when he looks into the faces of his father 
and mother ? Are there not moments of soberness 
when his burden grows heavy, and he is ready to cry 
out, like the poor knight cru&hed by his armor, " Take 



174 THE HEAVENLY PROMISE. 

this load from me or I die " ? And I appeal to the man 
without a vice, of clean life and unstained hands, who 
holds God's word in his conscience, and knows that 
his morality is nothing better than the cold shadow 
cast by a statue of noble mould and divine power, 
Do his virtues content his aspirations? Is he willing 
to face the stream of death, with nothing but his char- 
acter to cast in as a stepping-stone ? Does he not 
shrink from the searching ills of life, does he not 
start at the thought of death, with the painful con- 
viction that he is not ready for them? He may fight 
his battle bravely, and the world may cover him with 
its plaudits, but when the end comes will he not ex- 
claim, with the man described by Cecil, " The battle 
is fought, the battle is fought, but the victory is lost 
forever " ? 

And I ask the backslider the same question. 
Does not the joy of his earlier days sometimes come 
back to him as a song might float from the lips of 
those who have just entered heaven? Does he not 
remember what he was once, "from what height 
fallen," and what hopes, what promises, he has 
broken in his fall? Does not his eye moisten and his 
heart beat when he recalls the old family altar at 
which he used to kneel, and the songs he used to 
sing, and the hearts whose love gave its warmth 
to his prayers, hearts on which, be they in heaven 
to-day or on earth, he knows he has spread the dust 
of disappointment and the ashes of sorrow? 

I think there is no bitterness like that of the 
unfaithful disciple, when he awakens to the appre- 



THE HEAVENLY PROMISE. 175 

bension of his guilt. " I could not," said such a 
man, — "I could not bear the thought that I had left 
\uy wife to pray alone ; and I knew that she was 
praying always for me. I was miserable when I 
reflected that my children knew I had once been a 
follower of Jesus : and what could they think of me 
now ? So I asked God for strength, and I went into 
the house one day, and I said to my wife, *I have 
come to pray with you again ; we will set up the old 
altar once more.' And I called my children, and I 
said, 'Let us pray.' And when I saw their astonished 
looks, I felt as if all my years of faithlessness were 
wounding me through their eyes ; and when I knelt 
down, all I could say was, f Lord Jesus, take back 
the wanderer ! take back the wanderer ! ' " 

And just think now of those other laborings and 
heavinesses which are innocent in their origin, and 
are beyond all human help. There is a father whose 
heart is pining over the last blossom of his earthly 
hope, trodden under foot by a heavy bereavement. 
A chair is vacant at his table. A darkness falls 
upon him when his eye discovers some little me- 
mento of his lost child. Has this world anything 
to give him in the place of what Grod has taken? 
Has it any music so sweet as the childish voice that 
was melody in his ear and a hymn of promise in his 
life ? 

And there is that heaviness which can find no name 
in human speech, which death only lightens and 
heaven alone can take away, the heaviness of fathers 
and mothers sunk in shame and grief by the fol- 



176 THE HEAVENLY PROMISE. 

lies of their children. A widow was called, a few 
months ago, to visit and identify the body of her son, 
who had been killed in a brawl with his boon com- 
panions, ^he looked at him with eyes from which 
the very excess of trouble had banished the sweet 
power of weeping; but she knelt down at his side, 
and laid her hand upon the white cheek, and she 
could not even say, as David said in his mourning 
for Absalom, "Would God, I had died for thee, O 
my son ! " but she said, " Oh that he had died in his 
innocence ! then I should have had him forever ! " 
What anguish it is that can wring such a cry from a 
mother's lips ! and what power can heal it or soothe 
it but the power of that wonderful love w T hich speaks 
in the words of the Lord Jesus, "Come unto me, 
and I will give you rest"? 

It does not regard those petty cares which distract 
us only by moments and on occasions of passing 
interest. It is not an invitation to the vexations of 
pride or the shallow disturbances of vanity. Jesus 
looks down into our hearts. He seems to put aside 
all our trivial annoyances, all the little tumults that 
agitate the surface of life, and to reach down to the 
very springs of our life's great, secret, enduring sor- 
rows. 

There w'ere Pharisees around, him, and he seems 
to say to them, "You are going up to the temple to 
pay your tithes ; you are anxious with a thousand 
scruples of legal precision. But I know you have 
an inward unrest which no tithes can remove and no 
legal scruples can conceal." He looks upon some 



THE HEAVENLY PROMISE. 177 

woman of rank, and he seems to say, " You are try- 
ing to atone for a week's idolatry of fashion by an 
hour of worship in God's house. But I know that 
you feel a burden of self-reproach which no Sabbaths 
can diminish, and a feverish care and worry which 
make your pomp a mockery to your own soul." 
He looks upon a godless rich man, and he seems to 
say, "Envious eyes are turned on you, and you de- 
light to know it. The world sees in you its ideal of 
happiness ; but I see that your smiles grow fewer as 
your head grows gray. A skeleton sits down at 
your feast. Under your purple you are wearing 
a garment that chafes you with secret anxieties. 
You begin to hear the voice that is ready to say to 
you, 'This night thy soul shall be required of thee ! '" 
He seems to see before him all the griefs that prey 
on human hearts, the loneliness of widows, the cold 
desolateness of orphans, the pinched leanness of 
poverty, the haggard wanness of despairing guilt. 
He sees them all, he knows them all, and he turns 
to the multitude (if suffering, restless, anxious souls, 
and what love speaks out, what freeness and fulness 
of pity come forth in his pleading words, " Come 
unto me, and I will give you rest" ! Every tone of 
persuasion vibrates through these words, and every 
accent we give them is but a fresh pronunciation of 
the sole name which has efficacy to cure our sorrows. 
You are looking for rest in the world ; you think 
you can find it in the sunny spots of this life, where 
pleasure dances down the swift hours, or honor and 
riches beckon with smiling welcome. Jesus wins 



178 THE HEAVENLY PROMISE. 

you away from this delusion. "Come unto me," he 
cries, "and you shall find rest to your souls !" You 
think rest can be bought ; you are willing to pay 
money for it ; you are ready to search for it with the 
labor of years. You would buy off your sorrows at 
the sacrifice of your costliest treasures ; you would 
lay down life, in your hours of remorse and of appre- 
hension, for one line of that angelic pen which enrolls 
in heaven the names of Jesus' disciples ; but this 
grace is not to be bought. It is " without money 
and without price." Jesus says, "Come unto me, 
and I will give you rest." "I have taken the labor 
upon myself; I have paid the price. In the world 
ye shall have tribulation, but in me ye shall have 
peace. I offer you this peace. I entreat you to 
accept it. Only come unto me, and I will give you 
rest." 

Think who makes this offer. It is Jesus himself. 
Can any one doubt his power? There is no chamber 
in the palaces of light whose key is not in his hand ; 
there is no store in heaven from which he cannot 
draw. He lifts up the heaviest laden, and sets a 
smile over the tears of the mourner like a rainbow 
on the cloud, and makes his suffering disciple ex- 
claim, out of a blessed experience, 

" Earth has no sorrow which heaven cannot heal." 

And can any man doubt Jesus' willingness? Ask 
that question of the angels who sang at his birth, 
" Peace to men on earth ! " Ask it of the widow of 
Nain and Mary Magdalen and the penitent thief; 



THE HEAVENLY PEOMISE. 179 

ask it at the grave of Lazarus and in the house of 
the publican ; ask it of that world of love which 
crowds itself into the life of the Redeemer, and that 
heaven of sympathy which veils its brow at his 
death. Let the answer come from the old olives 
that shook their dews upon the agonizing Saviour in 
the garden of Gethsemane. Let it come from the 
cross, where Jesus stretched his hand to every re- 
penting sinner, and, with his dying lips, set upon 
his forehead the kiss of redeeming and reconciling 
love. 

The name of Jesus is power and willingness. 
There is life in that name. Love has made it the 
wing of its swiftest messenger. God has made it the 
talisman of hope. When the dying saint hangs to 
life but by one finger, and no name of wife or child 
can longer bring a gleam of recognition into his eye 
or a murmur to his lips, breathe the name of Je^us 
in his ear, tell of the Master who is calling him home, 
and the eye will sparkle once more, and the lip will 
tremble with eagerness. "Now," said a great and 
good man, when he lay on the verge of eternity, — 
" now, dear ones, leave me with my Saviour. 1 have 
given you my love. I have blessed you all, but be- 
fore you go, only help me with your voices to sound 
the praise of Jesus, and we will sing that hymn I have 
loved so well, — 

' How sweet the name of Jesus sounds 

In a believer's ears: 
It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds, 
And drives away his fears.' " 



180 THE HEAVENLY PROMISE. 

After the battle of Fredericksburg, a little drum- 
mer-boy was found, mortally wounded, lying in a 
clump of bushes. His mother had come from home 
after him, and she was then a nurse in the hospital. 
They wished to remove him into the hospital, but he 
begged piteously to be carried into an orchard that 
was near and to be laid down to die under the trees. 
At last, some one came up who knew him, and told 
him his mother was in the hospital. "Oh ! then," said 
he, "take me there. I only wanted to die in the 
orchard because I thought I should feel mother there ; 
for when I was coming away, she took me into the 
orchard, and prayed for me under one of the trees. " 
And a smile of peace lighted up his face as they bore 
him away to die in the arms of his mother. This is 
just the feeling which the true disciple has toward 
his Master. He wishes to live where Jesus is. He 
is willing to die where Jesus is. Show him a prison, 
and tell him Jesus is there, and he will enter it, and 
sing praises like Paul and Silas. Show him a fiery 
trial, and tell him Jesus is there, and he will walk 
through it like the three children in the furnace, 
saved by that company. Yes, there is power 
enough, there is willingness enough in Jesus; but to 
prove it, we must have Jesus with us and in us ; and 
how can we, unless we come to him? 

I ask you now to look a moment at the free, un- 
stinted, measureless extent of that divine sympathy 
which speaks in the words of Jesus, "Come unto 
me, all ye." He makes no distinctions; he treats 
all alike. Great labor or small, heavy laden with a 



THE HEAVENLY PROMISE. 181 

year of sin, or bowed down, like the white-headed 
sinner, under a lifetime of guilt, white ^ins or black, 
secret troubles or open crimes, with our sorrows full- 
blown, or with only a few small seeds of them in our 
hearts, it makes no difference. He knows there is 
no rest for us here, no hope for us hereafter, save in 
him. He asks for only one thing. Give him re- 
pentance, and he will give life in equal measure to 
all of us; the deepest-dyed sinner will receive as 
much as the most careful moralist. You may have 
piled your sins up like a mountain of ice, but if you 
will put penitence on the top, Christ's love will kindle 
it like a fire, and the mountain will all melt away. 
Love knows no restrictions. But if love ever seems 
divinely partial, it is when it redeems, with so many 
tears and so many yearnings, the life of one who has 
most shamefully slighted it. 

One of the most vigorous pens in Germany is held 
to-day by the hand of a woman saved by such love. 
She was the disgraced daughter of an illustrious 
house. Her brothers and sisters stood high in po- 
sition, while she was wandering for years, covered 
with her shame, and a prey to the tortures of her heart. 
She learned, one day, that there was to be a gather- 
ing of all her brothers and sisters under the old roof, 
and that her father had written to all of them to 
come and bless him with their presence once more 
before death should take from him the burden of 
extreme age. She longed to go with them and begin 
a new life, with repentance and contrition, at the 
feet of her father and near the cradle of her infancy ; 



182 THE HEAVENLY PROMISE. 

but she dared not go without knowing whether her 
father would receive her. So she wrote to her father 
these simple words: "Father, with shame on my 
head and sorrow in my heart, I ask, May I come, 
too?" And the answer came to her, written in the 
trembling characters of age and of haste, "God ble^s 
you, my poor child ! You have poured the last drop 
of joy into the cup of your old father. Come, come, 
come ! " And she came ; with a veil over her face 
she passed through the door ; she hastened to the 
chair where her father sat ; she knelt down before 
him and sobbed out, "Father, forgive me!" The 
old man laid his hand upon her head ; brothers and 
sisters, with tears of joy, gathered around her; but 
when they looked again at the father, they saw the 
shadow of death on his face. With that great joy in 
his heart, he had gone up to look down upon the 
brighter life of his child, and to wait for her coming 
without a veil over her face or a tear of shame in her 
eye. 

With such love, O sinner, Jesus entreats you to- 
day. And do you not sometimes, when you think 
of the name you disown, when you look on the 
future and call up the fair pictures of that gath- 
ering of the redeemed rn which you can have no 
share if you do not repent, do you not feel half 
moved to cry out in the longing of your heart, "May 
I come, too? Is there any room for a poor sinner 
like me? Is Jesus ready to receive me, after all my 
years of indifference to his love?" Yes, there is 
room, unbeliever and backslider, young and old, all 



THE HEAVENLY PROMISE. 183 

ye heavy-laden. Jesus sends his message to you. 
It is, "Come, come." Own your sins at his feet. 
Lay down your sorrows at his cross. Take his love 
into your hearts and give life to his service ; and by 
and by, when your life's labors shall cease and all 
your heart-heaviness shall fall away, what joy it will 
be to know that you are going to an eternal rest 
with Jesus, and that Jesus is calling to you, " Come, 
ye blessed of my Father." 



THE ARK IN THE HOUSE. 



"And the ark of the Lord continued in the house of Obed-edom, and 
the Lord blessed Obed-edom and all his household." — 2 Samuel 
vi, 11. 

In Jerusalem itself you seldom hear, save from 
the lips of strangers, the name Jerusalem ; and from 
the time of David that name gradually dropped out 
of the familiar speech of the Jews, and was succeeded 
by the title which it still bears among Jews and 
Turks, El Khods, or the Holy. This title the city 
w T on from the events recorded in this chapter. Upon 
his conquest of that part of the city which was 
called " the city of David," David became anxious 
to bring up the ark of the covenant, and to sanctify, 
by that august, mystical, sacred presence, the des- 
tined seat of his empire. During the vexatious 
ascendency of the Philistine power and arms, the 
ark had changed its abode again and again ; falling, 
at one time, into the hands of the enemy, and so 
signally avenging upon them the dishonor of its cap- 
ture, that they were at length driven to restore it, and 
only too gladly witnessed its passage across their 
borders to Beth-shemesh. 

It went from Beth-shemesh to Kirjath-jearim," the 



THE ARK IN THE HOUSE. 185 

city of the woods," on the northern boundary of the 
tribe of Judah, where it remained, most probably 
in the care of the Levites, for twenty years. Here 
David, attended by a suitable retinue, proceeded for 
the purpose of transferring it to his chosen capital. 
It is hard for us, without considerable preparation of 
knowledge and of feeling, to enter into that old 
strain of traditional sentiment and of religious 
emotion which hallowed and celebrated the ark as 
the mysterious centre of the national sanctity, and 
the awful symbol of the divine presence and glory. 
To do this, we ought to put before us all the facts 
which illustrate the history and the significance of 
the ark, and we ought to familiarize ourselves so 
thoroughly with the culture and the habits of the 
time, as to overcome the detrimental effects of the 
contrast between the spiritual idea of the ark, and 
its material form and appendages. For the ark was 
only a box or chest of acacia wood, about four feet 
long, and two and a half feet in width and depth, 
overlaid with gold, inside and out, and the lid, 
which was bordered with gold, supporting the mercy- 
seat with its two cherubim, whose extended wings 
touched each other over the middle of the lid. It 
was provided with rings, and rods or staves by 
which it was lifted and carried, and in its removal it 
was always wrapped up in its appropriate coverings, 
so that it was never seen by the multitude; and 
afterwards, when it reached its longest resting-place 
in the temple, nothing was ever seen of it outside 
the veil in the holy of holies, but the ends of the 



18'i THE ARK IN THE HOUSE. 

staves, which were withdrawn from the rings far 
enough to project a little. 

This ark was the depository of the two tables of 
the law, — God's autograph and holograph covenant 
with his people ; and perhaps also, by the side of 
these tables, the pot of manna and the rod of Aaron. 
Enthroned in the most sacred spot of the sanctuary, 
it was a monument of the divine origin of the Jew- 
ish law, a documentary assertion of the unity and 
supremacy of Jehovah, a tangible protest against all 
idolatry ; and gathering to it the splendor of mira- 
cle, the ceremonial pomp of worship, and the grow- 
ing romance of generations, it held the heart of 
the devout Israelite with all the affection he felt 
for his fathers and his country, and the awe and 
fear inspired by the symbol of that majesty which 
brooded over the nation, and often shone from 
between the cherubim. We can understand, then, 
with what a mixture of popular joy and of religious 
devotion the ark must have been conducted from the 
house of Abinadab on its way to the city of David. 
It was placed upon a new cart, drawn by oxen, and 
with David and his company in front, singing hymns 
and playing " on all manner of instruments," it went 
down the hill, through the rocky defile, and along 
the road, by the thrashing-floor of Nachon. At this 
point the oxen stumbled, slipped perhaps on the 
declivity of the rock or struck their feet against the 
stones, and the ark was shaken, and came near fall- 
ing. To prevent this, as it w r ou!d seem, Uzzah, who 
was driving the oxen, seized it with his hand, and 



THE ARK IN THE HOUSE. 187 

forced it back to its place, or steadied it, until the 
oxen had recovered themselves, and for this, as we 
read, "the anger of the Lord was kindled against 
Uzzah, and God smote him there for his error; and 
there he died by the ark of the Lord." 

I will not pretend that I understand this passage. 
It seems to me that something is left out in the nar- 
rative, which might have given us some help, we can 
now never hope for, towards a correct interpretation 
of the event. 

So far as we can conjecture its meaning, it seems 
to be precisely parallel with the judgment inflicted on 
the men of Beth-shemesh, for the violence they had 
done the ark in opening it and looking into it ; and 
they were seized with the same feeling of terror 
which possessed David, and showed their anxiety to 
be discharged, as soon as possible, from the dangerous 
custody of the ark. We can discover no sin in the 
act of Uzzah, unless the sin lay in the irreverent 
rashness of his hand, unless he was presumptuous 
enough to imagine that God could not protect his 
own, unless in his thoughtlessness he was anticipating 
the blasphemous cunning of later times, and acting 
on the so-called maxim, that "the end justifies the 
means." 

It is worth while to notice a very old tradition, that 
over these tragic scenes in the procession of the ark 
there burst forth a terrific thunder-storm, which is 
supposed to have given the striking name which was 
henceforth fixed upon the spot, "The breaking forth, 
or the storm of Uzzah." 



188 THE ARK IN THE HOUSE. 

Theie are at least seven psalms which celebrate 
this going forth of the ark, and in these the descrip- 
tions of a storm are significantly frequent, so that 
the tradition would seem to rest upon a fair basis 
of authority. And there is one other circumstance 
which may shed some light upon the character of 
the sin for which Uzzah was punished. The ark 
was intended to be carried by the Levites. Its 
divine sanctity seemed to require that it should be 
treated with the respect and delicacy accorded to the 
most costly treasures, yet David had spared the 
shoulders of his men, and carried it in a cart, as 
the Philistines had done, as if it had been an 
ordinary piece of household furniture. And it would 
seem that David himself was sensible of some such 
want of. respect in his mode of conveying the ark ; 
for when, three months afterwards, he came back to 
complete the removal, he did not practise again the 
lesson taught by the Philistines and set it upon a cart, 
but had it borne on the shoulders of the Levites. 

Yet at the time of Uzzah's death, David was filled 
with mingled alarm and dissatisfaction. It appeared 
to him an inexplicable thing that such a fearful judg- 
ment had leaped from the very mercy-seat ; danger 
seemed to lurk where he expected only blessing and 
protection, and in the hasty mistrust that crept into 
his mind, he left the ark in the house of Obed-edom, 
and went back to his city without it. "And the 
Lord blessed Obed-edom, and all his household." 
Here starts into view, if not the most impressive, 
yet the most attractive point, along the whole line of 



THE ARK IN THE HOUSE. 189 

this narrative. How we wish that some hand had 
opened the door of this house, and suffered us to 
look in for a moment upon the family to whom this 
visitant had come, unexpected as the angels that 
came to the tent-door of Abraham. They probably 
looked upon the ark, when it crossed their threshold, 
very much as unbelieving men now look upon the 
religion of Jesus. They saw it under its gloomiest 
aspect. It was a dark mystery that quenched the 
smiles on their faces and crusted the free flow of 
their speech with an icy reserve. I doubt if their 
sleep was as calm and clear as usual the first night 
that veiled shrine rested uuder their roof. They 
must have felt as many a sinner has felt when the 
faith of Jesus has first entered his house in the con- 
version of a child or a parent, as if God had come 
too near, or sin were too bold to venture within his 
awful shadow. " Daughter," said an impenitent man 
to his child, when she came home from her baptism, 
"this house is not large enough for your Jesus and 
such a sinner as you would call me. One or the other 
of us must leave." " It is true, father, and I hope 
that the sinner will leave, and that my father will 
remain." If there was any sin in the house of 
Obed-edom, it must have been cast out ; and at the 
foot of that mercy-seat, beneath which slept the 
thunders of Sinai, and around which glowed the radi- 
ance of the Shekinah, the members of that house- 
hold must have learned to bow in the worship of 
purer hearts than they ever knew before, till, at 
length, fear was lost in grateful joy, praise took the 

8* 



190 THE ARK IN THE HOUSE. 

place of deprecation, cheerfulness came back where 
apprehension had sat, and prosperity emptied out its 
horn of plenty and filled their garners and their wine- 
presses, so that all men, looking upon them, forgot 
the judgment on the rash Uzzah in the blessing that 
descended upon the pious Obed-edom. 

But we are not to imagine that this blessing lay 
wholly or chiefly in the increase of substance and the 
accumulation of riches. It is a mistake to represent 
the Old Testament as teaching that the earthly re- 
wards of the just consist in a material prosperity, and 
that he has no higher prize to call forth his ambitions 
than the pleasure of eating the fat of the land. Was 
it reserved for us to discover that riches bring a 
snare, and that, by itself alone, material prosperity 
is a blessing to no man ? Are we the first to see that 
wealth hangs over many a house like a plague in the 
air, tainting it in the springs of its happiness, and 
infecting its moral life with cancerous spots too deep 
for surgery ; that it eats like a gangrene into the soul 
of many a man born capable of something better than 
idleness and a dinner, drawing corks and dividends, 
and steeping down the energies of his youth into 
the rose-scented essence of indolent luxury? Is it 
only among us that the fortune of the family so often 
becomes the curse of the children, and that the noble 
qualities of the father are extinguished in the son by 
the very inheritance he leaves him? No ! prosperity 
is only the sign, not the substance of the blessing. 
There are three kinds of wealth : that wdiich a man 
holds, that which he wins, and that which God gives 



THE ARK IN THE HOUSE. 191 

him. The first sits on him as loosely as the coat he 
wears ; the second grows to him like the flesh on his 
bones ; but the third is the very life that he breathes. 
There is more money in the first ; there is more in- 
tellect in the second ; but in the last there is more 
manhood than in both the others put together. If 
wealth is to be a blessing, it wants a better voucher 
than a court of probate can furnish, and a sounder 
fibre than lies in the naked brain, or it comes to lie 
over a man's soul like an enormous sponge, drinking 
up all the generous juices of his nature, till he walks 
the streets as dry and hard and cold as the bare 
skeleton of a man, and goes down to his grave with- 
out leaving enough of the salt of charity behind him 
to keep his memory from rotting. If you do no 
honest work for your money, and render to God and 
men no honest equivalent for it ; if it stunt your 
powers, stifle your benevolence, and alienate you from 
the broad sympathies of your fellow-men, — then I 
believe, as one of the most solemn verities of the 
divine justice, that, though you may sit in state like 
Dives, and dazzle the world with your purple and 
fine linen, you will sink at last to Dives's couch, and 
in the eternal world will have no share but in his 
misery. But grow with your prosperity, let your 
heart grow warmer with every gleam of God's sun- 
shine, let your moral life unfold itself and show that 
you are more of a man and more of a Christian for 
eveiy step of advantage by which God raises you, 
and train up your children to a religious sense of the 
obligations which you feel yourself, and you may 



192 THE ARK IN THE HOUSE. 

take your fortune as a blessing by divine promise, 
and you may leave this world without a fear to haunt 
you that you have made over to your children the 
tremendous reversion of a curse. I repeat, there- 
fore, that the blessing which the text speaks of did 
not lie in the increase of riches. It could not, for 
the fact which I now ask you to consider more 
closely, that it came from the presence of the ark in 
the house. It was, distinctively, a religious blessing, 
and it must have leavened the whole interior life of 
the family. Before that shrine the pride of wealth 
would be abashed and humbled. In that presence 
no mould of selfishness could deposit its hateful web 
over the affections of parents or children. 

There could be no bickerings there, no efferves- 
cence of sour tempers and angry rivalries. That 
ark was the centre of union for all the interests of 
the house ; the air was purified around it, the life 
that moved before it was elevated and sanctified, and 
through its oracular mysteries heaven spoke its 
sweetest prophecies, and God came down to hold 
communion with his worshippers. 

Now let us pass to that great truth, of which this 
fact may serve as the antitype, the truth that the 
religion of Jesus is the ark in the house ; that it does 
for us what the ark did for the household of Obed- 
edom ; that it holds us fast to the idea of a divine 
superintendence ; that it sweetens our life by the 
infusion of a kindliness and gentleness bej T ond the 
freaks of passion ; that it raises the tone of our 
whole thought and feeling by the charities which it 



THE ARK IN THE HOUSE. 193 

nourishes and the hopes which it inspires ; that it 
incarnates the principle of duty, and sets love above 
life, wisdom above rubies, worth above wealth ; and 
that, whether it bring in money or not, whether it 
rob the heavens of a golden rain, and shear the fat 
sheaves from the fruitful earth or not, it gives us a 
content which is proof against want and against 
abundance, against the irritating cares that grow like 
thorns on the rind of poverty, and against the moth 
and rust that consume the pride and beauty of the 
unrighteous Mammon. What a good conscience is 
to the man, that the recognition and practice of re- 
ligion are to the family ; they are the conscience of 
the household, an authority that extorts respect from 
the most refractory, a spirit that glows with a warmth 
and brightness no unchristian fireside can know, and 
a monitor to young and old, that warns and pleads 
with a persuasive power even a father's love or a 
child's tenderness is unequal to. 

If you ask me whether religion does all this, and 
proves all this in every house in which it is nominally 
enshrined, I answer, no; no more than the ark had 
brought a blessing to every place where it had tarried 
before it came to the house of Obed-edom. 

There are Philistines among us who treat religion 
as the old Philistines treated the ark ; they take it 
captive, and make a parade of it for a little while, 
and then send it beyond their borders. There are 
houses in which religion is practically as mute as the 
unread Bible that lies on the shelf; in which the 
graces of a christian character never burst through 



194 THE ARK m THE HOUSE. 

the harsh gravities of a stern, severe family discipline, 
and in which, if the children ever see any likeness to 
a holy character, they are reminded, not of Jesus 
with his outspread hands of blessing, but of Moses 
with the rod in his hands. There are families in 
which religion, though professed, is a moral nullity, 
represented by no duties ; reflected in no special 
virtues ; pouring no oil on the troubled temper ; 
lending no softness to the mother's reproof or the 
father's correction ; and so completely obscured, 
buried up, forgotten, in the hurry and worry of life, 
that its very existence is not suspected until some old 
register or some casual remark discloses the fact that 
there is a professed christian in the house. Could 
there be a bitterer satire on any man's profession of 
religion than the ignorance of his own friends and 
children that he is a member of the church of Christ? 
No, when we speak of the ark in the house, we 
speak of something that makes its presence visible 
and felt. It may be only the devoted piety, the 
pure heart, the stainless, fragrant, flowering life of a 
single member of the family; it may be the incor- 
ruptible honesty, the even and storm-proof tem- 
per, and the manly, truthful, upright character of a 
christian son ; it may be the quiet grace, the spiritual 
loveliness, the affectionate fidelity, the uncomplaining 
constancy, the winning and exemplary conduct of a 
christian daughter ; it may be wrapped in the veil 
of a father's anxious but loving solicitude, or of a 
mother's tenderness ; and it may stand alone in the 
household, without a sympathy that can drive a cloud 



THE ARK IN THE HOUSE. 195 

from its solitude ; yet its power is felt by every 
heart, descending like the dew of evening without 
noise, and trembling and sparkling like the dew on 
every green leaf in the life and office of the family. 

That man's moral nature is but a fossil who does 
not honor in his heart this ray of a better life which 
heaven sends into the home he loves, and he is less 
than man who would seek to silence this language of 
God, or lift a desecrating finger against this ark in 
his house. A converted banker in London has told 
the story of a son of his who was weak in intellect, 
but was a humble, consistent christian, and able to 
set before his father an exnmple that preached to 
him like a daily sermon. His father was a quick, 
passionate, irascible man, full of hot and furious 
speeches, but the first time after his son's conversion 
his wrath broke out in the family the poor boy fell 
upon his knees and began to pray for his father. "And 
never," said the father, " after that did I begin to 
give way to my ill-governed temper, but my poor 
boy fell upon his knees and besought God to teach 
me better. It was the most thorough lesson I had 
ever received; and of all the marks of kind feeling 
that were given me when I became a disciple of 
Jesus, the dearest to me was the glad tear that stood 
in the eye of my boy, then sick unto death, as he 
seized my hand and said, 'Now, father, 1 can go, for 
you don't need me to pray for you any more, you 
can pray for yourself.'" 

And think you that the house is insensible of the 
spirit that broods over it in the christian love and 



196 THE AEK IX THE HOUSE. 

faithfulness of one of its members? Does the hus- 
band remain callous to the anxieties of a devoted 
christian wife? Is the son unmindful of the prayers 
of his mother or the counsels of his father? Will 
the slow years fail to quicken the seed that has been 
sown in the tears and heart-aches of a watchful sis- 
ter? Are there not storms on the ocean to bring 
back to the sailor the image of the home he has 
left? Are there not troubles and sorrows to wash 
the guilty heart of its contaminating clay, and show 
again the seal which love has impressed upon it 
in the years gone by? Unhappy is that house which 
cannot throw over its children the shield of relig- 
ion, which leaves them no memory of a love that 
sits watching beyond the grave, and looking dowu 
on them from the skies of immortality. Unhappy 
is that house which offers no little sanctuary from 
the griefs and afflictions that befall it, no ark of 
refuge, no altar of prayer, where God can bind up 
again its shattered hopes and speak comfort to its 
torn and bleeding affections. The sun may shine 
brightly upon it now, the air may blow sweetly 
upon it, its walls may whisper of careless ease and 
luxurious enjoyment ; but its prosperity is treach- 
erous, the days of darkness are coming, the night 
of sorrow and death is creeping toward it, and 
there is no power in it to cheer with hope the 
doom that is sure to overtake it, no hand to write 
upon its earthly ruins the promise of a fairer house 
and a happier home in the unchangeable clime of 
heaven. 

A young man of once great promise, high char- 



THE AKK IN THE HOUSE. 197 

acter, and large wealth was condemned in an Eng- 
lish court for a crime he had committed; and when, 
standing at the bar, he received the sentence and 
heard those words which were meant to soften, but 
w r hich only sharpen its deadly edge, "May God have 
mercy on your soul ! " he straightened himself, looked 
in the face of the judge, and calmly and sadly said, 
"Perhaps if your lordship had taken interest enough 
in my soul to offer that prayer before, you would not 
now have been busy putting the rope around my 
neck ! " 

Is there not many a sinner who may fling this 
retort at those who sit in Pharisaic judgment on him 
to-day ? Is there not many a daughter who can cast 
it at the house from which she goes out plumed and 
rustling in her pride and gayety, but without moral 
clothing enough to keep her soul from the polluting 
breath of the world she lives in? Is there not many 
a son drifting to-day on the fragments of the ship- 
wreck he has made, who could say to his father, 
"You gave me gold, you freighted me deep with 
what you sweated soul and conscience to gain, and 
you launched me forth without a compass to guide 
or an anchor to hold ! " Fathers and mothers, is 
there no ark in } 7 our houses, no sanctity to keep off 
from them the dangers that beset your children, no 
emblem of a better world and a nobler life? Then 
may God press his ark close up to your doorstep, and 
fling over your life its shadow of solemn responsi- 
bilities and eternal consequences, till you be con- 
strained to open the door and take it in, and enshrine 
it in the inmost chamber of the house. 



REASON OF THE FAITH. 



" Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a 
reason of the hope that is within you." — 1 Peter iii, 15. 

I speak of the Reason of the Faith. It compre- 
hends : — 

First. A Personal, 

Second. An Impersonal Element, which latter is the criti- 
cal and historical evidence of the Gospel. In each of these 
two elements there is, 

First. A Constant Element. 

Second. An Element of Variation ; and it is the variable 
element which is chiefly assailed by the sceptical tendencies 
of our time. 

I suppose that, for the purpose which the text has 
in view, we may regard the words, "hope that is 
within you," as very nearly coincident in meaning 
with what we understand by the words "faith of our 
Lord Jesus Christ." Of course if we apply a nice, 
verbal, analytical, and exegetical criticism to the 
phrase, we could not say this, we should have to 
give the word "hope" a sense fairly within the 
proper definition of the term "hope," and this would 
compel us to discriminate between this interior 
" hope " of the christian and his more general and 
fundamental christian faith. Here, then, is an in- 



REASON OF THE FAITH. 199 

stance of that large class of hypercritical errors and 
infelicities of interpretation, into which we are be- 
trayed Iry a narrow literalism that presses too hard 
upon the meaning of words, and gives too little 
scope to the logic of thought which links them to- 
gether, and in so linking them, modifies the mean- 
ing of every one of them by its connection with all 
the others. 

You know how often the apostles speak of that 
virtue and habit which they call "boldness," for it is 
both a virtue or grace, and a practice. They pray 
for this virtue. They beseech christians to pray for 
them, that God may give them this boldness. They 
entreat christians to cultivate it in themselves, and 
show it to the world in their conversation. 

Now this boldness, if we look at the sense of the 
word, implies just what Peter enjoins in the text, by 
the term " readiness," — " readiness to speak " ; it im- 
plies the qualification and the willingness to stand up 
and stand forth for the faith of the gospel, the abil- 
ity to speak in defence of the truth, and the resolute 
courage to do it, under frowns or smiles, to honest 
inquirers or captious unbelievers. This is what Peter 
enjoins, and this is what we mean by the " purpose" 
of the text. And there is one word in the text which 
is sufficient, of itself, to make it perfectly clear to us 
that this is its purpose; it is the word " answer," — 
that "ye may be ready always to give an answer.'' 
This word is, in the Greek text, the original of our 
word "apology," and we must remember that when 
Peter used it, there were not clinging to the word 



200 REASON OF THE FAITH. 

those accessory ideas which have grown up around it 
in our later use, and which have made it one of the 
humble, faint-hearted words of the dictionary, a sort 
of word in reduced circumstances, going about with 
shamefaced obsequiousness, and a telltale conscious- 
ness of wrong-doing. When a man apologizes now, 
we understand that he is excusing, not justifying, 
himself, and the word carries with it a shade of de- 
preciation and humiliation. Certainly, in the popu- 
lar sense of apology, we owe, as christians, no apol- 
ogy to the world, and we are not ready to make any. 
"Apology," as Peter uses the word, corresponds with 
the apostolic " boldness " I have spoken of, for the 
same thought of speech or speaking is in both words ; 
the boldness is an " outspokenness," and the apology 
is a " speaking back," in justification and defence. 

And with this in mind it is worth while to look and 
see how nicely the first part of the text is jointed to 
the latter part, and how precisely the words of Peter 
respond to one another. The " answer " corresponds 
with the "asking," and the "apology" corresponds 
with the " reason," and this echo between the terms 
becomes plainer still when you see that, in the origi- 
nal, the "apology" includes the "reason" or "logos," 
so that we may say that we are required, when asked 
the "reason," or loyog, to give the "reason back" 
or the "apology." So that, in fact, the "apology" 
or "answer" which the christian is exhorted to be 
able and ready to give, is just the reason which he has 
for being a christian ; and the import of the whole 
text might be well rendered into the words of advice 



REASON OF THE FAITH. 201 

which one of the fathers gave to a young disciple : 
"My son, yon are not bound to tell every one that 
you are a christian, hut if any one ask you why you 
are one, you are bound to tell him the reason." 

This apology, then, this reason for our hope, is 
the leading idea in our text, and the word "reason" 
is the radiating point in the cluster of its ideas, its 
implications and its uses. 

And the first important question which we raise in 
the discussion of this reason is the question, What 
is this reason ? And in trying to answer this ques- 
tion, and as a clew to guide us and a thread on 
which to string our various considerations, I will lay 
down the statement that the apostle does not con- 
template here any one reason in particular ; he does 
not have in his mind, under the references of the 
word "reason," any single, fixed, constant, uniform 
argument which is to stand for all christians alike, 
in all circumstances and through all time. He does 
not mean what we may call the historical reason of 
Christianity, which one may learn from the books 
and recite as a lesson by rote, or any other reason 
which will serve equally well, for A, B, and C, and 
which A might hand over to B, and B to C, and all 
three pass around to the rest of the alphabet, as an 
equally competent voucher for the hope of all, Greek 
and Jew, learned and unlearned, young and old, 
ancient and modern. Of course we have a standard 
logic of christian apology, venerable by tradition, 
rich with the eloquence of the ages, ripe with 
scholarship, wreathed with the laurelled honors of 



202 REASON OF THE FAITH. 

victory and of fame ; but suppose we were required 
to plead that argument to-day in justification of our 
christian hope, how many of us could do it, I will 
not say to the silencing of our enemies, but to 
the satisfaction of our own hearts? If we had to 
build our humble confidence and our joyful assur- 
ance of the future on this standard logic, this his- 
torical reason of Christianity, how strong would that 
confidence be, how high the flight of that assurance? 
You may think it a bold averment for me to make, 
but I make it with painful proofs of its correctness 
under my eyes, aud within my own experience, that 
for any young christian, unfamiliar with critical 
studies, and half educated in history and in science, 
the historical argument of Christianity is a perilous 
venture, which only a sound heart and a diligent 
brain and the grace of God can bring to a happy 
issue. From the prominence of religion, its educa- 
tional studies, such as those of sermons, the Sunday 
school, the religious press, are carried further with 
us than the general studies of- the simple intellect; 
and the result is, that in our earlier years our prac- 
tical religious knowledge is unbalanced by any cor- 
responding attainments in general culture. We grow 
up with a host of ideas which we have simply ac- 
cepted without trying to base them definitely on any 
intelligent reason. And so, when first these ideas 
are brought face to face with our larger and older 
learning, when our religious culture is put to the 
luminous test of our more critical knowledge, we 
almost always suffer a shock of surprise ; we find 



REASON OF THE FAITH. 203 

there is darkness where we thought there was light ; 
Ave find doubt where we looked for certainty ; we 
are called on to readjust our opinions, and to root up 
our prejudices ; and the whole process is one of 
tangled perplexities, embarrassing alternatives, and 
almost revolutionary dethronement of the old no- 
tions, and inauguration of the new enlightenments. 
And I repeat, the process is a dangerous one, unless 
you place it under the guarantees of an honest con- 
science in the pupil, and a wise guidance on the 
part of the teacher. 

But to show that the apostle was looking at some- 
thing very different from the historical reason, or the 
critical reason, we have only to consult the text, and 
we see, in the first place, that it does not read " ask- 
eth the reason," and in the original it does not read 
"asketh a reason," but simply, "that ye may be able 
to give an answer to him that asketh reason," etc. 
I see no objection to translating the text in this way. 
The most exacting purist in the English language 
could not deny its idiomatic propriety. We actually 
have the phrase, "to give reason," current in our lit- 
erature and speech, and we mean by it just what the 
apostle meant here, for he contemplated a large body 
of evidence, too large to be called a reason and too 
various to be called the reason, a body from which 
every christian would draw his own familiar portion, 
and to which also every christian experience would 
add its own separate contribution. But if you look 
at the text once more, you will see that this reason 
bears a definite relation to its object, and that object 



204 REASON OF THE FAITH. 

is, not the christian hope or faith taken generally, 
but "the hope that is within you," the christian faith 
as it is qualified in every man's experience, embodied 
in every man's convictions, and intensified by every 
man's consciousness. Now if you will show me that 
this faith is the same in all men, in every element of 
its consistence, in every character of its expression, 
in strength, in degree, in vital force, in aspiring 
reach, in heavenly uplook and worldly outlook, then 
I will admit that there can be but one reason for it, 
and that what holds good for you, must hold good for 
me, what satisfied Paul, must have been enough for 
Apollos, and what brought Zaccheus from his tree 
was the same reason that pulled Dionysius from the 
stone benches of the Areopagus. 

I have no doubt that you perceive as clearly as I 
can, the necessity of guarding my words against an 
obvious inference which would assail the unity of the 
christian faith. You might say to me, it was, after 
all, the same reason which went home to the under- 
standing and hearts of all those men ; their hope did 
actually rest on the same foundation ; the christian 
faith is one and the same for all men and for all ages. 
Now I subscribe heartily to this catholic sentence in 
the evangelical protocol of christian doctrine, — one 
faith, one Lord, one baptism; and, of course, as the 
faith is one, it must have, at its base, one and the same 
justifying reason. But this reason is what I have 
meant as the critical reason and the historical argu- 
ment of our religion, and I am showing that this 
critical reason is not the reason which the apostle has 



REASON OF THE FAITH. 205 

in view in the text, but that this apostolic reason, 
which we may also conveniently call the apologetic 
reason, is personal to every christian man, and is, 
in part, just as peculiar, just as individual and singu- 
lar, as his christian experience. 

It is easy to see that this apologetic reason is really 
the larger reason of the two, for it may comprehend 
the historical and general argument of Christianity, 
besides its special evidences drawn from the personal 
experience. And not only is it the larger reason, 
but it is, we may justly contend, the more authorita- 
tive and decisive reason. To what evidence does the 
New Testament most frequently appeal? What tes- 
timony does it invoke for the truth and genuineness 
of its doctrines, and the moral power of the faith 
which it implants in its disciples ? Certainly it is not 
the critical evidence, not an evidence which we throw 
into the scales of an intellectual judgment, or into 
the crucible of a logical analysis. It is not to the 
pure intellect the Master submitted the consummate 
problem of life and salvation, or he would never 
have said, "Except ye become as little children, ye 
can in no case enter into the kingdom, " which is a 
complete vacation of mere intellect, and contains the 
first distinct assertion ever made of the imperial 
supremacy of the moral nature. 

And in these words the Master gave the world a 
new instrument of life and culture, a novum orga- 
non, that turned humanity upon its axis, and brought 
its spiritual hemisphere for the first time nearest to 
heaven, and under the broad hand of Infinite Love. 
9 



206 KEASON OF THE FAITH. 

And it was in their very consciousness of the divine 
life that wrought in them, in the exulting joyous- 
ness of the gospel's power to kindle and light up 
a new sense in the christian soul, that the apostles 
always appealed to the "witness within" as the 
first, best, last, divinest evidence of the "hope that 
was within." For them, indeed, the historical argu- 
ment, as we have it, did not exist. The critical rea- 
son is not an apostolic reason, and, from their very 
origin, from the fact that they have been gradually 
developed in the course of time, and were only in 
embryo in the time of the apostles, we may justly 
hold that these reasons are, however necessary, but 
subordinate and accessory ; they are the portico and 
the peristyle of the temple, they touch not the in- 
most shrine, they look not upon the Holy of Holies, 
and a man may worship at the altar, in the full 
assurance of faith, who has passed them by with 
but an indifferent side-glance. And I ask whether, 
in our actual experience, we do not find that the 
personal argument is the stronger, more persuasive, 
more satisfying argument; that the gospel's clear- 
est record of evidence is written in the private 
chapters of individual history, and is not written 
in the books. I can well believe that an honest 
man might remain in doubt upon the historical 
evidences of Christianity, and yet give a most 
hearty faith and a most loyal obedience to the Lord 
Jesus Christ. It would be like some case brought 
before a grand jury ; the legal proofs may fail to fur- 
nish ground for proceeding against a man of whose 



REASON OF THE FAITH. 207 

guilt the whole jury are morally persuaded, and 
while they indorse the papers, "Not a true bill," 
they feel, in their consciences, that before God the 
bill is a true one, and the law is too narrow for 
the proofs. And you might file a copy of the 
critical and historical proofs of the gospel before 
a grand jury of honest men, and I can conceive 
that they might find the technicalities too intricate 
for a clear decision, they might grow weary of their 
task, and exclaim, "Here are too many knots for 
common mortals to untie. Here is too much sifting 
for a few grains of corn," and they would take up 
the bill and write across it, "Ignoramus," and yet 
go home perfectly convinced that "the gospel is 
the power of God unto salvation." For the proofs 
you submitted would hardly touch that side of the 
gospel which lies nearest to the core of a man's 
deepest and most energetic convictions, the side on 
which, when he sits in a jury-box, the judge speaks 
to him, not the counsel, and on which he hears the 
law, not the evidence alone ; and that side, in chris- 
tian experience, is the moral consciousness, with its 
native germs touchedinto a nobler life, its powers set 
teeming and swarming with other germs, unknown to 
the "natural man," and all its voices, once locked in 
silence by the imprisoning mystery of guilt, now 
freed by a whisper of omnipotent love, and keyed 
to a strain of harmony which the soul feels to be 
mightier in meaning than human speech can articu- 
late, and able to link itself, the soul knows not how, 
to the music that trembles through God's sphered 
universe and thrills the hosts of eternity. 



208 REASON OF TPIE FAITH. 

And when we use language like this, we need not 
be, as is often charged, guilty of a crude rhapsody ; 
for that indefiniteness whicfc obscures the expression 
of the strongest christian feeling, like a nimbus 
around the head of an old pictured saint, is, in fact, 
one of the characters which our nature imposes 
upon every transcendent emotion and upon every 
inspiration of a transcendent power. There is the 
same indefiniteness in the loftiest human genius, and 
hence such genius breaks out into poetry, and hence 
the true poetry lies in the thought, not in the lan- 
guage, and is always transcendent, by its catholic 
recognition of nature, as in Homer ; by its catholic 
comprehension of man, as in Shakespeare ; by its 
profound insights, as in Dante or Goethe ; or by its 
subtle and mystic suggestiveness, as in Coleridge or 
Browning. And does any one deny the power of the 
grandest and most inspiring music because of its 
indefiniteness, which is so great that from Pythago- 
ras to Darwin no man has been found who could 
bring it within the parallels of any scientific measure? 
And Darwin himself, in his chapter on music, almost 
grows rhapsodical, and falls little short of a poetical 
flight that would have broken the wings of natural 
selection. And we might say to the objector against 
the validity of the internal witness of the christian, 
" You find fault with what you call our rhetoric and 
rhapsody, you wish us to impose scientific terms 
upon the moral power that regenerates and vivifies 
us. Very well, do the same yourself first for those 
powers in which you do believe, show us how the 



REASON OF THE FAITH. 209 

rhythmic waves of sound and the tremulous re- 
sponses of the nerves set the human soul swinging 
through these vast arcs of which you cannot see the 
summit ; graduate for us the eagle-flight of genius, 
and show us by what mechanical ladder of proto- 
plasm and cell-walls the poet scales his ethereal heights 
and becomes the cosmopolite of a score of worlds. 
Show us how to do this, and then you will have 
more reason to ask christians to square a divine 
power under the formula of a human science and to 
reduce to an equation that mighty ground-swell of 
the ocean of thought and feeling which proclaims 
God in the gospel, and the gospel in the history of 
our race. 

I feel as keenly as any one can, the need of strin- 
gently cautious language in speaking of the experi- 
mental witness of the gospel, of that evidence which 
is supplied by the christian's own consciousness. 
For we are sure to be met with the query, Has not 
the Mohammedan this witness? Does not the howl- 
ing dervish exhibit the transports of this interior 
power? Does not the Hindoo fakir show us a sim- 
ilar tenseness of devotion and red glow of religious 
enthusiasm ? And I admit that all these exhibitions 
are on the same human plane as the christian experi- 
ence ; but there is as little difficulty in distinguishing 
between the christian type and the others, as the 
naturalists finds, when he looks upon two butter- 
flies colored just alike, in telling which has the 
true typical colors, and which has simply mimicked 
the others. Religious history has its mimicries and 



210 REASON OF THE FAITH. 

mockeries, and it would be a strange demand for 
science to make, that we should discredit the true 
prophet because of the false, and slay the sheep 
because the wolf goes prowling about in sheep's 
clothing. 

Let me now briefly add that history confirms the 
emphasis which we place upon the interior evidence, 
by the fact that in every epoch of signal revival, men 
turn to the inner witness of divine power more than 
to the critical testimony. Jesus himself did this ; he 
showed how unlike the old methods were to his own 
new instrument when he said, " If ye will do the 
works, ye shall know of the doctrine, whether it be 
of God": not first evidence, then doctrine, then 
works ; but first the work, then the doctrine and 
the evidence, corroborating all our experience ; for 
when christians lapse into infidelity, they slip first, 
not in doctrine, but in practice ; not in intellect, but 
in conscience. 

See what prepotent eminence the Keformers have 
always given to this personal and inward evidence, 
how Luther called the church from priestly authority 
to the testimonies of grace, and drove the roots of 
christian life and hope down into the experience of a 
justifying faith. Observe how, even in that strenu- 
ous protest which Fox and the Friends organized 
against the dead and sapless conservatism of the 
English Church, the fresh impulse from within turned 
back upon itself, and sought in the heart for the 
highest evidence of what was called the New Light 
and the Inward Witness, which, whatever we may 



REASON OF TIIE FAITH. 211 

think of its bizarre and eccentric exhibitions, was 
certainly a religious power worthy of high rank 
among the christian forces which have guided the 
development of modern history. See the same ten- 
dency in the origin and early history of Methodism, 
which again threw the preponderating weight in the 
scale of experience as against authority, and which 
may be said to be a scanning of the whole christian 
life with the accent on the first syllable, and that is 
the personal consciousness, or the work of God's 
grace in the soul. Finally, see how, in any ordinary 
and local revival, the inner witness exalts its author- 
ity, and raises its voice, and becomes the one com- 
manding and decisive argument in the christian's 
apologetic reason "for the hope that is within him." 
Such instances are verifications of the logic of our 
religion. They confirm the profound meaning of 
Christ, " They that worship the Father shall worship 
him in spirit and in truth," in a truth that does not 
cling to traditional ordinances, like lichen on a 
mouldy wall, but springs from the very spirit of the 
worshipper himself, the flower of his regenerate hu- 
manity, and carries in itself its own best evidences, 
as the flower does its own seeds. 

And now comes the conclusion, which is for us 
the most significant part of the discussion. Chris- 
tianity must put forth her apology ; in the sense we 
have considered, afresh in every age ; and as the 
ages change, as society is educated to higher levels, 
as the arts and sciences advance, and the mind's 
outlook upon the world is enlarged and clarified , 



212 REASON OF THE FAITH. 

we have the feeling that this apology is required, 
within certain limits, to present new aspects, to 
meet new demands, and to adjust itself to the new 
relations of history. We have this feeling espe- 
cially pronounced in presence of the new forces of 
our time, and thousands of christians anchored, I am 
afraid, in shallow water, are uneasy and apprehen- 
sive, lest some storm be brewing that may compel 
them to part their cables, or make them put to sea, 
and in their timidity they are raising the dispirit- 
ing ciy to the church which the captain sends to his 
maintop, "Furl all, and lash tight to the yards." 
Some good and eminent brethren of our own de- 
nomination are sorely tempted to give up Baptist 
logic for catholic liberality, let go close communion, 
and other things of that sort, in hope of weather- 
ing the hypothetic gale by casting overboard a part 
of the cargo, and knocking away some of the heavy 
top-hamper. Really, I cannot discern any special 
cause of anxiety. I am not an ecclesiastic weather- 
prophet, it is true, but I know there have been 
more terrific storms than any that are yet in the sky, 
more fearful monsters of the deep than Darwinism 
and Positivism, and the old ship has never had her 
bulwarks under water yet, nor has an honest soul 
been swept from her decks. Be assured, brethren, 
the fault of our liberal compromisers is not in the 
exigencies of the time, but in their own gratuitous 
haste to make concessions ; not in the unsound tim- 
bers and knees of the ship, but in the weak knees 
and the extremely cartilaginous backs of honorable 



REASON OF THE FAITH. 213 

gentlemen who like to sail with a goodly company, 
glistening with silken sails and a fresh coat of paint, 
a great deal better than they like to stand up, like 
men, to the tug of war for unfashionable principles 
and unpopular platforms. 

Let me ask you to consider that, in what we have 
called the apologetic reason for our faith, there are 
two elements, the personal, which grows out of the 
individual christian experience, and the impersonal, 
which we have called the critical evidence and the 
historical argument, and that in each of these there 
is one constant element, with one element of variation. 
In the experimental evidence of the gospel, the con- 
stant element is the actual work of God in the soul, 
while the variable element is all that part of the 
christian experience which is peculiar to the individ- 
ual christian ; and you can see, if you keep this dis- 
tinction in mind, that it is perfectly true that every 
man has his own reason for the hope that is within 
him. 

We are accustomed to say that the language of 
Zion is the same language for all the members of the 
great family. 80 it is, as English is the same 
tongue for all of us, yet we do not all speak and 
use the English alike ; in fact, you can tell any one of 
us from all the rest by the very tone of his speech, 
and by the way in which he puts together the king's 
English. And it is just so with us in the language 
of Christ, there is always a variable element by 
which every christian is known. He came to Christ 
by his own road. He brought with him his own 
9* 



214 REASON OF THE FAITH. 

mental furniture. He was helped or hindered by his 
own temper and habits, and he has had, all along the 
way, a special experience which is the ground of 
special evidences for him. What need is there, 
then, to disturb ourselves with different types of 
christian experience in different ages, or among dif- 
ferent peoples? We say, there is an element of 
variation in the very nature of this evidence. Let 
this element go on varying ; it can safely do so, it can 
meet every new force of education, it can adapt 
itself to any degree of refinement, it can open to 
every new science and respond to every necessity of 
human progress ; while below this, and under all its 
changes, there remains the same central imprint of a 
divine hand on the heart, the same undying testi- 
mony of " God working in us, the hope of glory." 

It is just the same with the impersonal evidences 
of the gospel. There is a constant element, which 
is the history of the Bible and the christian church, 
and there is an element of variation which is found 
in what we may call the scientific evidences, and I 
beg you to give its full significance to the fact that it 
is mainly this variable element which is assailed by 
the sceptical tendencies of modern science, and that 
it is mainly the disturbance of this element which 
agitates, in any degree, the fundamental positions of 
the christian faith. And this variable element, this 
body of scientific credentials, has always been vary- 
ing ; and we say, let it vary to the end of time ; the 
future will show precisely what the past has shown, 
that neither essentially nor historically can the gos- 



REASON OF THE FAITH. 215 

pel be shaken by any change in the matter or the 
color of its scientific evidences. 

It is in the nature of things that every new science 
should throw some light into dark places, that our 
views of whole ranges of truth should be altered 
by new methods in philosophy, that we should have 
to shift our opinions over on new pedestals, when 
new discoveries bring us fresh material for our judg- 
ments. Why, when Copernicus told the world what 
the ancients, like Hipparchus, had told it before, that 
the earth is in motion, the priests were as much 
frightened as if Copernicus had engaged to bring 
the whole solar system about their ears ; and when 
Columbus declared the earth to be a globe, they 
unanimously resolved that christian doctrine required 
it to be flat, the Pope wanted it flat, it was to the 
interest of morals that it should be flat, and flat they 
would have it ; and great was the jubilation of infi- 
dels at the strife between science and religion, as 
they regarded it. Well, has the motion of the earth 
unsettled the gospel? Has its roundness circum- 
vented the Bible, or brought about a revolution in 
morals? 

Look at Genesis, that famous battle-field of the 
giants, where for ages rival philosophies have wres- 
tled with one another, and the physical sciences all 
run atilt against the truth of Scripture. Why, I do 
not kuow how many skeletons of interpreters and 
commentators you might dig up on that field, but 
I should say almost enough to stock a good-sized 
museum of antediluvian fossils. And under all the 



216 REASON OF THE FAITH. 

resounding blows which have been struck on that 
desperate field, from Origen down to Pye Smith and 
Hugh Miller, the gospel has stood with a face of 
serene composure, unrippled by a moment's alarm, 
and so it will stand under the shocks of new sciences, 
while the cry of angry champions goes up and the 
skeletons of defunct assailants go on accumulating 
there, till, by and by, to get down to the real sense 
of the Book will be like digging for crocuses in 
spring through the debris of an old cemetery. I 
once had a partial charge of the education of young 
men in Harvard College, and I have often been 
amused at the uniformity with which certain phases 
of character were brought into view in every suc- 
cessive class of the young men. Surely, there was a 
profound sagacity in the man who invented sopho- 
more as a second-year college-student. Well, it 
does no harm to speak of it now, many of us have 
been in that latitude. I observed that after the class 
had been pretty well fed with the elements of geolo- 
gy, and had had time for a little digestion, an attack 
of Genesis would invariably break out among them. 
Some would take it mildly, some would have it hard, 
and a few patients would be quite prostrated by it. 
I never knew any of them to die of it, and I believe 
they all recovered, as most sensible geologists do. 
But I confess that I can never listen now to the 
flippant criticism which is so popular among young 
sceptics of a certain class, without saying to myself, 
?t There is a sophomore with weak constitution, suffer- 
ing from science on the liver, for it certainly cannot be 



REASON OF THE FAITH. 217 

on the brain, there is not room enough there for it to 
spread so much." And I would counsel any young 
man who is tempted to ventilate his scepticism, to 
wait awhile. If he is suffering from an attack of 
Genesis, a little more knowledge will relieve him, 
and I verily believe that if he is sufferiug from Dar- 
win, homoeopathy is his surest recourse, and a little 
more Darwin will re-establish his health. 

Why, my friends, our experience in these times is 
not at all novel or peculiar. The variable element 
in the christian apology has always been changing 
since the gospel was first preached. Sometimes it 
has gone from one system of philosophy to another, 
from Augustinism to Pelagianism, and vice versa; 
from realism to nominalism ; from the schoolmen to 
Descartes ; from Locke to Kant ; from Kant to Ham- 
ilton. Sometimes it has lain dormant, and been 
silently outgrown, like the oil cosmogonies, and like 
many old methods of interpretation, such as the ex- 
treme literal and the ultra-allegorical. Sometimes it 
has been completely renovated by the sudden acces- 
sion of new material, like the Usherian chronology of 
the pre-Noachan age and the old views of the recent 
creation of man, now entirely overthrown by incon- 
testable discoveries and geologic research. And 
every one knows that, side by side with this obso- 
lescence of old opinions, and this fluctuation of the 
variable element in christian evidences, there has 
gone on an equally remarkable change in the weap- 
ons and tactics of infidelity. The old schools of 
sceptical philosophy are as antiquated as the sneers 



218 REASON OF THE FAITH. 

of Porphyry. Hume's logic and Voltaire's sarcasm 
have lost their point for our generation, and in 
meeting the present line of attack upon us, we have 
to face an entirely new quarter. 

But the fact remains, and it is the very pivot of 
christian confidence, that the impersonal christian 
evidences admit of a wide range of variation, that 
their very nature is flexible enough to adapt itself to 
the broadest diversities of scientific opinion, that it 
is in this range of variation we find the great adap- 
tiveness, the universal aptness of the gospel, a test 
under which any other religion crumbles into pieces, 
and that through all these changes there is not a 
flaw to be seen, not the scar of a single wound, not 
a wrinkle of age, not a rust-spot of disuetude, not a 
crack or scratch of wear and tear, upon the face and 
features of the one central, apostolic, universal rea- 
son, the one that lies nearest the divine power of the 
gospel and envelops that power in the human heart 
and biings it home, as nothing else could, to the 
heart of every true christian man ; and that is the 
verity and the measure of what the gospel does for 
us and in us and through us, and which is every 
Christian man's first, best, and last reason for the 
hope that is within him. 

We do need a better exhibition than we have yet 
given of the true christian apology, one that shall 
show how entirely secondary are those variable ele- 
ments which physical science attacks, how entirely 
consistent with the faith of the Lord Jesus is the 
very freest play of these subordinate elements, nay, 



REASON OF THE FAITH. 219 

how necessary this facile and elastic play of the out- 
lying limbs of the body is to the body's vital organs, 
and one that shall exalt the intrinsic evidence, the 
personal reason, above all others, as the very element 
of the gospel's catholicity, the very secret of its 
power to become what it is, the one religion for all 
men and for all time. 

Meanwhile, my brethren, we have no need to dis- 
turb ourselves. The constant element in the evi- 
dences of the gospel is not assailed by science. The 
attacks of such men as Strauss and Renan, and their 
school, are not countenanced by the severe spirit of 
our modern science. Physical science cannot assail 
this constant element, for its jurisdiction does not 
lie in the same court. It only thunders at the out- 
posts. Darwinism itself, a magnificent hypothesis, 
raised by a master mind and buttressed with a mas- 
sive learning almost unparalleled, has not, if you 
thoroughly understand it, the power to shake a stone 
in the walls of the christian temple or efface a line 
of the gospel record ; and still, as I have said, it is 
but a theory, and it must give way in the very effort 
to comprehend itself and to explain its explanations. 
No, we need not be disturbed. From our citadel 
to-day we can look down upon the progress of the 
time and upon the movements of the enemy, as the 
old knight looked out from his beleaguered castle on 
the Rhine. There was a deep valley on one side of 
him, and beyond the valley a rich table-land covered 
with vineyards and cornfields, which was his by in- 
heritance, but which he could not hold because it 



220 REASON OF THE FAITH. 

was cut off by the deep valley. He knew that valley 
ought to be bridged, but he was not able to do it; he 
had not wealth enough to build the bridge. Shut up 
by his eager foes, but safe on his pinnacled crag, 
word was brought him one day that the enemy were 
bridging the valley to get at his stronghold. He 
went up to the battlements and looked out. A smile 
broke upon his face, and he cried to his loyal men, 
"Capital ! Don't disturb them ! Let them throw up the 
last arch, let them pin down the last plank, and then, 
thank them, the bridge is mine, and I take the table- 
land." And he did it. So I say, my brethren, bless 
the Lord for that divine policy of Providence which 
has built, and which will go on building, bridges for 
the gospel, till the banner of Christ shall gleam over 
every valley and blaze on every table land. 



BAPTISM. 



"Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death; that like 
as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, 
even so we also should walk in newness of life.'" — Romans vi, 4. 

Christianity, brought into comparison with other 
religions, establishes its claim to a pure and beautiful 
simplicity that places it, even in its lower and merely 
aesthetic aspects, far above them all. When we re- 
flect how complex and cumbrous was the religious 
system of the Jews, how little it dealt with the heart, 
and how much it absorbed all worship in a round of 
shows and pomps, forms and ceremonies, we cannot 
be surprised that the simple religion of Christ, in its 
exterior features, should have seemed to the old Jew 
cheap and poor by the side of the august religious 
pageantry of the temple. And when we reflect that, 
to the Jew, nearly all of religion consisted in mere 
ceremony, and little seemed necessary beyond the sen- 
suous homage that lay in bended knee and uplifted 
hand, we cannot wonder, again, that the christian 
doctrine of repentance and faith, and the christian 
duties of self-denial and love, should have appeared 
hard and humiliating, and become a grievous stum- 
bling-block. With the heathen it was still worse. 
They were in the depths of a profound materialism, 



222 BAPTISM. 

and to them the gospel, both in its doctrines and in its 
ceremonies, seemed mere foolishness. Now I believe 
that, had Jesus been merely a great reformer, guided 
only by human wisdom, he would have followed one 
or the other of two tendencies, which almost univer- 
sally operate in such circumstances ; and either he 
would have borrowed from the ceremonies of the 
Mosaic ritual, or, going to the other extreme, he 
would have banished all outward forms and left only 
a system of religious ideas. 

But Jesus was no merely human reformer. He 
was no philosopher founding a sect, no theosophist 
building up a school of dogmatists. He was dis- 
charging a heavenly mission, and organizing the 
means by which the results of that mission might be 
applied and extended among men. Therefore Jesus, 
in instituting the christian church, sought only two 
objects, to nourish the christian life of his disciples, 
and to extend its power in the world. He called 
forth no agencies, he appointed no ceremonies, he 
commanded no duties, but such as he deemed needful 
to accomplish these two objects. Hence the religion 
of Jesus is so simple. Its basis is in the convictions 
of the soul. Its vitality is cherished by the hidden 
ministries of the inner life. It comes into the sight 
of men in its fruits, not in hollow rites and glittering 
forms. It has nothing of a merely ceremonial, nothing 
of a merely formal, character. 

Baptism and the Lord's Supper are not ceremonies 
in the sense in which we apply that term to the ritual 
of the old Jewish religion, or to that of the modern 



• BAPTISM. 223 

Roman Catholic worship. They not only have a dis- 
tinct and intelligible meaning, but they perform a 
distinct and peculiar office in the interior economy of 
the christian life and the christian church, and in the 
outer relations of the gospel to the world. The 
Lord's Supper is not a form observed, but a fact ac- 
complished, a communion with Christ, an exercise of 
love towards the church, and a proclamation of Christ 
to the world. Its function is that of a duty dis- 
charged, not merely that of a rite celebrated, and it 
is clearly set forth in the words of the apostle, "As 
oft as ye eat this bread, ye do show the Lord's death 
till he come." 

1. But baptism, from its positionand significance, is 
undoubtedly the more prominent of the two holy rites 
which our Saviour instituted and enjoined upon his 
disciples. First of all let us consider the ceremonial 
character of baptism. There are certain bonds of re- 
lationship which connect baptism, in its purely out- 
ward and formal character, with the general class of 
those observances which we usually call ceremonies, 
and which were familiar to all the religious systems 
of the world. And among such observances there 
were always a few which were invested with particu- 
lar solemnity, and which were intended to convey 
some special lessons. In this class were such cere- 
monies as stood at the introduction of a religious 
career, or served to give prominence to some new 
feature or some new phase of the moral life. With 
the Jews, circumcision solemnized the advent into 
life itself ; it was the initiatory rite of Jewish nation- 



224 BAPTISM. 

ality. No special religious idea was couched under 
it beyond the general significance of admission into 
the citizenship and privileges of the Jewish common- 
wealth. The gospel broke down that old jealousy 
and pride of nationality. Christ recognizes no favored 
nation in his church, and circumcision, in its most 
fundamental idea, is too much at war with the very 
essence and scope of Christianity ever to have been 
perpetuated, either in itself or in any substitute for it, 
in the Christian church. 

The heathen, also, were accustomed to the use of 
special consecrating initiatory rites. The Greeks 
cultivated a large class of what were called " mys- 
teries " professing to lead men to a higher knowledge 
and a purer life, and to which entrance could be had 
only by certain prescribed ceremonies, which were in- 
tended to shadow forth some great spiritual meaning. 
Look, for a moment, at "John's baptism," which was 
plainly such a rite as we have considered ; intended to 
typify the introduction to a new career of the convert 
submitting to it. Evidently, John's baptism was no 
new, strange thing to the Jews. It was, in fact, but 
the use of their own method of leading into the Jew- 
ish congregation a proselyte to the law. 

2. Now, look at the sacramental primacy of bap- 
tism, its position, before any other rite, at the very 
gate of the christian church and at the very door of 
christian discipleship. It is the great symbol of the 
christian life, the only rite which the disciple is en- 
joined to observe in his individual character, and it is 
the rite by which he enters the brotherhood of Christ. 



BAPTISM. 225 

Evidently Christ chose baptism with a tacit reference 
to its character and design as a rite of christian in- 
itiation. He looked to the accepted and current 
meaning of such rites, and knew that it would be in- 
terpreted by men with the emphasis which belonged 
to a rite of initiation. He took baptism as it was 
known to the Jews, and was practised by John, 
and perhaps also, employed by other nations than the 
Jews. The Jewish mode was immersion. John's 
mode, it appears from Josephus, independently of 
the New Testament, was the same as that used by 
the Jews ; and so Jesus, ordaining baptism, ordained 
what baptism, at that time, meant for everybody ; 
ordained just w 7 hat John had practised and what the 
word means, immersion. 

But standing where it does, at the head of chris- 
tian discipleship and at the entrance into the church, 
baptism, like those other initiatory rites we have 
alluded to., must be supposed to have its own pe- 
culiar significance. We know well what the Jewish 
baptism meant ; it meant the purification of the soul, 
its thorough cleansing from all the stains of sin, the 
entrance upon a new life. And now, were we left, 
without any positive teaching, to infer the signifi- 
cance of baptism from the mode, we could not infer 
anything less than the meaning it had for the Jews ; 
and on the other hand, were we left to infer the 
mode of baptism from its known significance, we 
could not infer any other than the one we prac- 
tise. But even suppose we knew neither the precise 
significance nor the precise mode : we could then fall 



226 BArTisM. 

back upon the universal meaning attached to such 
rites of initiation, the idea of a new life, the idea 
of a renovation and a purification, and from this we 
could hardly fail to deduce the character of the rite 
and the mode of its administration. 

3. Look, then, at the symbolical meaning of bap- 
tism. We have said that Christ appointed no rites 
save such as enter also into the class of duties and 
agencies, helps to the christian life and ministries 
for the preaching of Christ. And it is so with bap- 
tism. It „ sustains a relation first to the disciple and 
secondly to the world, first as a christian office and 
then as a christian symbol, an agency of christian 
teaching. In the first relation, and in its aspect as 
a christian duty, it is the typical expression of the 
change which has been wrought in the heart of the 
disciple. Its very mode is expressive, and is essen- 
tial to express the character of this change, which is 
that conveyed to us in the doctrine of regeneration, 
a change as complete and as thorough as the mode 
of the ceremony ; " old things are passed away, all 
things are become new." The disciple is "a new 
creature in Christ Jesus," he "is dead to the world, 
and alive to Christ," " buried to sin, and raised to 
holiness." This total change being the fact to be ex- 
pressed by baptism, it is difficult to imagine anything 
that could have been devised more beautiful in its 
adaptation, or more significant and intelligible in its 
import. 

But baptism has another office in respect to the 
disciple himself. It is not only the initiatory into a 



BAPTISM. 227 

new relation, it is the symbolical assumption of that 
relation ; it not only expresses a fact, accomplished in 
the soul of the disciple, but it conveys an obligation 
to be fulfilled in his life ; it is not only retrospective, 
but prospective, and in this relation it is that baptism 
takes the character of a sacrament. The sacrament 
was among the Romans the name of the oath of alle- 
giance and fidelity which the soldier took upon his 
enlistment into the army. And baptism is the oath 
of allegiance and fidelity to Christ, " Buried with him 
in baptism, that like as Christ was raised from the 
dead, even so we also should walk in newness of life." 

But as a sacrament, also, we see the same corre- 
spondence between the rite and the meaning which 
holds in other relations. It not only declares, but it 
promises newness of life. It not only suggests and 
symbolizes, but it pledges and binds to the renuncia- 
tion of sin and the pursuit of holiness. It expresses 
and solemnly confirms by the voluntary guarantee of 
the disciple's promise the fact that he has left behind 
him the world and its fellowship, and preferred the 
communion of the christian church and the citizen- 
ship of Christ's kingdom ; and occupying as it does 
an initial place among the rites of religion and the 
public duties of christian life, evidently Christ meant 
it should be observed by the disciple at the earliest 
opportunity. We mistake its character if we think 
we can postpone it at our will, or adjourn it to suit 
our entire convenience. 

It is the first christian duty that summons us after 
we have received Christ ; and its character, its rela- 



228 BAPTISM. 

tion, its importance arc such as led Christ to connect 
it, in immediate and indissoluble sequence, with the 
exercise of faith in him : " Repent and be baptized," 
" Preach the gospel," " Teaching and baptizing," 
" He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved." 
But baptism sustains another relation, of a general 
character as a christian monument. It is the symbol 
to the world of the gospel of Christ, of those ideas 
which, of all that enter into its revelations and its 
doctrines, are the most fundamental and the most 
distinguishing, the ideas of death and life, both in 
their literal and natural, and in their spiritual and 
christian sense. " Life and immortality have been 
brought to light in the gospel." The promise of im- 
mortality, on the part of Christ, and the hope of it, 
on the part of the disciple, are both conveyed by the 
ordinance of baptism. We do not now see these in 
the rite, as the old Jews and Greeks saw them, be- 
cause we have grown so entirely familiar with the 
thought of that vast future to which Christ first 
pointed the way. But to all the early church bap- 
tism was a clear and expressive symbol of the res- 
urrection of the dead. 

Viewed, then, in its symbolical intentions, we 
see the propriety of the form, considered in its sac- 
ramental order ; we see the importance of the ob- 
servance, regarded as the ceremonial confession of 
Christ by his disciple ; we see the significance of the 
ordinance. It is precisely adapted to the designs it 
contemplated. It is an exact and faithful herald of 
the purposes of Christ. It is a simple and intelligible 



BAPTISM. 229 

memorial of the greatest doctrines of the gospel. It 
is the appropriate and emphatic expression of the 
cardinal fact of christian experience. It is the di- 
vinely appointed and eloquent monument of the 
mission of Christ and the cherished hopes of the 
christian church. And such and so nice is the cor- 
respondence between the rite and its design, be- 
tween the act and the purpose, that we can say of 
it, more than of any other religious ordinance ever 
observed by man, the mode is the rite, the manner 
is the deed. Touch the form, and you mutilate the 
thing itself. Impair the manner, and the most beau- 
tiful and expressive feature is marred beyond cure. 

Let us remember, baptism is the command of 
Christ. Its sanctity is established by the same divine 
authority from which issues every christian obli- 
gation. If you are a christian, you will cherish a 
spirit of submission to that authority which will 
honor this duty, and covet its performance without 
hesitation and without delay. The man who can 
pause to ask whether baptism is essential to salva- 
tion pauses from an impulse of selfishness that will 
lead him to cheapen the whole process of obedience, 
and seek to enter heaven at the least possible cost. 
Love anticipates obedience, and delights to show its 
faithfulness by its alacrity. 

With all the joy with which we witness the solemn 
burial to the world and with Christ, of those who 
have anchored their souls to him, there mingles a 
feeling of sadness at the thought that for every one 
whom God has given to the prayers of christians 

10 



230 BAPTISM. 

and the love of Christ, there remain so many still 
blind to their true position, and careless of the future 
before them, so many for whom prayer is still unan- 
swered, and to whom Christ is still preached in vain. 
The air teems with the expectation, and hums with 
the whispering mysteries of God's love ; the hour is 
sublime with the unwritten histories that are slum- 
bering under the shadow of its winged moments ; 
the prophetic instincts of our heart and the solemn 
voices of the truth, tell us that you are to decide now 
for time and for eternity. I put the terms of your 
election before you, I summon the recording angel 
of God to witness, I point to the judgment that is 
fast approaching, and in the name of my Master I 
bid you " choose, this day, whom you will serve." 



THE SINNER'S LOVE, THE SAVIOUR'S 
FORGIVENESS. 



" For she loved much; but to whom little is forgiven, the same lov- 
eth little.'" — Luke vii, 47. 

There are no other teachings of Jesus which come 
home to our hearts with more power than those 
which unfold the divine mystery of love. They are 
like the softer and gentler strains of music, which 
whisper after the shrill and loud tones of an orches- 
tra ; they speak to delicate organs which noise only 
beats into confusion, and they creep into little clefts 
and apertures of the soul which trumpets and thun- 
der only close up with a shudder. The threatenings 
of Jesus bear no comparison in number to his per- 
suasions of love ; and what an addition of power 
these very threatenings derive from the fact that they 
fall from those lips which trembled so often with the 
accents of love. Jesus lived the love which he felt 
and taught, and every word of severity which he 
speaks, every look of reproof, every gesture of in- 
dignation, shows against his love like a storm-cloud 
in a sunlit sky, and makes us feel that, with all the 
brightness and summer warmth of the divine good- 



232 sinner's love, saviour's forgiveness. 

ness, there is a terrible secret of destroying force 
ready to be revealed in its season. And it seems to 
me that the only occasional threatenings of Jesus, 
taken as hints, and coming as the mere outflashings 
of a power that evidently seeks to suppress itself, are 
so much the more significant. 

When love is angry, I know there is some great 
cause for it. Nature may try hard to cover up the 
havoc which Vesuvius has made. She may sow seeds 
over his lava-beds, and plant tufts of grass on the 
lip of his crater, but when he sends up his lambent 
tongues of flame, and crowns his head with a wreath 
of sulphurous smoke, we know that danger is near, and 
that mighty elements are provoked beyond retentiou. 
And so when out of the gospel there come sounds 
of wrath and of terror, when the glad tidings are 
broken by rumblings of volcanic thunder, when love 
hushes itself to listen to an echo that saddens it while 
it listens, when Jesus pauses, in his mission of love, 
to remind us of the day when love will be power- 
less against the dread justice of Almighty God, we 
ought to be convinced that what is spoken is but a 
small part of what is held in reserve. One line from 
Jesus is a volume, one word from his vast love counts 
for tens of thousands. And it has struck me that 
Jesus himself must have sought relief from the over- 
whelming anticipations of the judgments which await 
the impenitent ; that his heart must have been heavy 
under the shadow of these judgments ; and that, 
knowing as he did, that the greater part of those he 
addressed would go down into blackness and dark- 






sinner's love, saviour's forgiveness. 233 

ness forever, he sought with peculiar eagerness to 
imprint on his own mind the charm and the grace 
of that love which responded to his own love ; he 
turned to it as parched travellers seek a well in the 
desert, and he magnified it, not as a debt paid to him 
as the Kecleemer alone, but as one of the sweetest 
gifts which he could receive as a man. Love longs 
for love. It is not angry because it does not get its 
return. It does not grow less when it is met with 
coldness or scorn, but it nourishes itself with tears, 
it pines in sorrow, and prays with heart-ache and 
weariness ; and when it discovers some little sign 
of answering love, what joy thrills it, what a heaven 
spreads over it, what a peace of growing hope wraps 
it, like the stillness of a spring night, when all the 
buds are swelling, and all the seeds are talking of 
the morrow's sunshine. 

With such eagerness, with such quiet gladness, 
does Jesus seem, in the passage before us, to turn to 
the woman who had shown her love for him by 
bathing his feet from the fountain of her eyes and 
wiping them with the hairs of her head. Let us un- 
derstand the meaning of this story. Jesus is at din- 
ner with a Pharisee, a man who evidently honors him 
as a teacher of profound wisclon and high authority, 
but who knows little as yet of his spirit and real mis- 
sion, and who is fenced round with all the prejudices 
of his caste and party. There is a poor woman 
whom Jesus has previously met, and to whom he has 
spoken words of tenderness and healing, and in 
whose heart he has breathed the peace and joy of 



234 sinner's love, saviour's forgiveness. 

forgiveness. He had found her loaded with shame, 
and, for aught- we can tell, brazen with the boldness 
of such impudence as the years of folly are sure to 
bring with them. But he had touched her woman's 
nature. His voice had roused all that was left of 
her youthful innocence and her maidenly purity. He 
was the first, no doubt, to tell her that there was yet 
a place where she might come without offence, there 
was yet an eye that looked on her with more than 
motherly pity, and a hand that would clasp her own 
without fear or without thought of defilement. She 
had been scouted by the Pharisees ; they had held up 
their fringes when they passed her ; she had been 
despised by her own sex ; and for years of degra.- 
dation, no speech of human regard, no voice of 
compassion, no syllable of hope had fallen on her ear. 
But Jesus passed her. He did not draw away his 
seamless robe. He did not shun her as one infected 
or accursed. She saw in his eye what no other eye 
had ever shown to her. She heard in his language 
what she had never expected to hear from human 
lips. Her own mother was not more gentle. Her 
own home held no such sweetness as distilled from 
the tongue of the Master. As he spoke, her girl's 
heart came back to her, her shame fell from her like 
rags, her sins became loathsome, the beauty of a 
better life grew possible to her, hope sprang up with- 
in her, and at the feet of that loving Saviour she 
humbled herself with mingled anguish and joy, and 
from his hand of benediction she received the promise 
and the beginning of that heaven on . earth which 



sinner's love, saviour's forgiveness. 235 

swallows up the disgrace and the suffering of a once 
bold, but now penitent sinner. 

Between such a character and Simon the Pharisee, 
there could be no stronger contrast. Simon would 
have felt himself polluted by that woman's touch. If 
he had lived in a house like ouri, she would never 
have found admission. His servants would have 
turned her from the door, and the money he would 
never have given her, he would have given to them 
for ejecting her. How many such Simons are in the 
world now ! A few years ago a wretched girl was 
picked up, in the streets of London, by a noble 
christian mau, and was so won by his kindness and 
generosity that she abandoned her vile haunts, and 
determiued to lead a life of redemption and of honor. 
She was penetrated with love for her benefactor, and 
went to his house to show her gratitude. Agaiu and 
again she was pushed from the doorsteps. But one 
night, when there was an assembly in the house, she 
found means to steal an entrance, and before all the • 
compauy, she rushed to her deliverer and seized 
him by the hand. Guest after guest, reading too 
plainly the history of her life, turned away with a 
sneer, or held up his hands in sanctimonious depre- 
cation. But when the poor girl could force back the 
emotion that choked her utterance, when she told the 
story of the deed that had saved her, and repeated the 
words of kindness which she said were the first she 
had heard since the day she had been cast out upon 
the w^orlcl , when she poured out her gratitude to her 
deliverer, and, pressing his hand to her lips, turned 



236 sinner's love, saviour's forgiveness. 

toward the door, the cynic sneer died away, the 
pharisaic hands came down, and a voice broke forth 
from a corner of the room, "He has saved many 
such, God bless him ! " 

Now just so did the woman come into the presence 
of Jesus. He had done for her what mortal man 
could never do ; he had forgiven her sins. Her tears 
were tears of joy and love, such tears as fathers and 
mothers shed over long-lost but recovered children, 
such tears as children shed over the undeserved 
but never - failing love of forgiving lathers and 
mothers. 

She cares not for Simon, she heeds not those who 
are gathered in the room, she has no eye for any 
but Jesus ; she hastens to him, where he sits, she 
kneels down at his feet, and with her tears and her 
kisses, too full of gratitude for speech, she pours out 
her love in signs which the angels could interpret, 
which Jesus was moved to read, and which have, 
passed into a record more indelible than the sculp- 
tured rocks of Egypt. 

What obtuseness was that of Simon that he could 
not read those signs. What blindness had his pride 
brought upon him, that he failed to see the miracle 
which Jesus' love had wrought. He saw nothing but 
the old sinner, and he looked on her with abhor- 
rence. Tell me, my friends, when you see an old 
sinner coming to Christ, do you not feel as Simon 
did? You look with distrust on his tears, you think 
he needs a great many such tears to wash out his sins. 
You know what he has been, and you know little of 



sinner's love, saviour's forgiveness. 237 

what grace has done for him, and you would advise 
us to show him the door, and keep him out till he 
could come in, not like a sinner, but like a Phar- 
isee. Blessed be Jesus ! he knows where repent- 
ance begins, and we know only where it ends. We 
would like to wait till a man has climbed up to 
us, but Jesus waits only till he has set his foot on 
the first round of the ladder, and then he reaches 
his hand to him. Now Simon, with his stiff and 
angular precision, could not understand such lan- 
guage as that of the woman, and Jesus determined 
to interpret it for him ; and he does this in a way 
by no means complimentary to Simon. He con- 
trasts her treatment of himself with that which he 
had received from Simon. He says in effect, "You 
have received me with courtesy, but she has greeted 
me with love ; you did not give me even water, 
she has given me tear^, — and the reason of this is 
plain. You, in your pride, think you need nothing 
of me, least of all forgiveness ; she, in her ex- 
treme guilt and sorrow, has humbled herself at my 
feet, and taken her pardon at my hands. Much 
has been forgiven her, therefore she loves much ; 
but of men like you, to whom little if anything is 
forgiven, but little love is to be looked for." 

Here, then, is the first truih which we learn from 
this narrative, the truth that Jesus seeks for love, 
not for honor. Simon gave him honor, he opened 
his house to him, and spread his table for him, and 
surrounded him with the marks of high esteem ; yet 
one tear from the penitent at his feet was more costly 
10* 



238 sinner's love, saviour's forgiveness. 

in Jesus' eye than all the formal respect lavished on 
him by his host. 

What cheer there is in this thought for every poor 
disciple ! No matter what his state may be in this 
world, he can bring to Jesus a wealth which kings 
cannot rival. Every sigh is heavier than gold, and 
every tear brighter than a jewel; and while honor 
stands waiting with its words and air of ceremony, 
his humble love is welcomed to the feet of Jesus, 
and his heart gladdened with approval. Which are 
we giving Jesus to-day, honor or love, the frigid 
respect of Simon or the warm gratitude of the 
woman? That heart which broke in love for sinners, 
asks for the hearts of men ; that love which shed itself 
in redeeming blood, calls for love in return. Jesus 
will turn from the feast of honor to smile upon 
the lowliest penitent that comes a suppliant for his 
pardon, or a beneficiary to thank him for his mer- 
cy. Your professions of regard, my friends, are 
nothing but the meats which Simon spread upon his 
board ; they grow tasteless when love is kneeling at 
the table. 

Your courtesies of observance, your speeches of 
polite deference, your spotless demeanor, your proud 
self-uplifting above the stained and unclean sinners 
around you, count for nothing with Jesus when a 
forgiven soul lays itself down before him, and a kiss 
of devotion proclaims the worship of a glad and 
willing heart. It is love that kindles service into 
pleasure. It is love that Jesus deserves, love he de- 
mands ; and honor without love will never come 



sinner's love, saviour's forgiveness. 239 

nearer to Jesus than Simon came as he poured out 
his acid comments across the table. Would he have 
stooped to the feet of Jesus ? Was that necessary to 
honor? No, he would leave that to publicans and 
sinners, while he carried his head erect and thanked 
God he had done nothing for tears aud nothing for 
forgiveness. And this leads us to observe that a 
genuine love of Jesus springs from the sense of his 
forgiveness. Jesus came into the world to save sin- 
ners, and only self-conscious sinners can feel the need 
or understand the greatness of that salvation. We 
may revere Jesus, we may admire him, we may 
crown his name with all jewels of speech, but we 
have no true love for him if he has not touched our 
hearts with his finger of forgiveness. When a great 
citizen of Florence lay dying, at the time of the 
plague, deserted by the courtiers, abandoned by his 
friends and his own family, he appealed to a crowd 
under his window for some offices of charity. "No," 
said one, " you are not rich enough to buy us. We will 
not give life for gold." But up started a young man 
and pushed through the crowd exclaiming, " I will 
come in to you, not for money, but for gratitude, for I 
am one of those you saved from the death-block." 
That is the language of true christian love ; it says 
to Christ, "I will come to thee, not for thy great 
name, not for reward, not for praise, but because I 
am one of those thou hast saved from death." And 
until a man has felt himself covered by the broad 
pardon which mercy has hung over the cross, the 
deepest spring of love is dry in his heart. Pharisaic 



240 sinner's love, saviour's forgiveness. 

honor cries to Jesus, "I do thee reverence as the 
greatest teacher known to men. J build thee a shrine 
among the altars of saints and angels. I write thy 
name above the names of the best and wisest. Is 
not this enough ? I bow to thee in secret ; must I 
bow to thee before men? I bid thee sit at my 
table : must I kneel down like the woman ? Are her 
tears to plead more eloquently than all my speeches, 
and her humility and sighs to go further than my 
splendid hospitality ? " This is the tone of this 
world's Simons. Nothing has been forgiven them, and 
they feel no love. They have no eye for that fairest, 
most tenderly beautiful, divinest aspect of Jesus' 
life and character, that in which he shows himself 
as the friend of sinners, and the Saviour of the lost. 
But it is just this which love never tires of exalting. 
The song which the redeemed will sing in eternity 
celebrates him that has saved us and washed us in his 
own blood. 

Apply this test, my friends, to your own hearts. Is 
it the cross of Christ that sheds on his life the glory 
you admire, or does it take all the grandeur of that 
life to make the cross an image of beauty and of 
power for you ? Is it to the atoning Saviour you are 
looking for hope, or is it to him only who spake as 
never man spake ? Is Bethlehem larger to you than 
Calvary, or the temple more attractive than the gar- 
den? All this is true, if your regard for Christ does 
not send its roots down through the intellect into your 

heart's consciousness of forgiveness. You know 

s 

nothing of the preciousness of Jesus' redeeming blood, 



sinner's love, saviour's forgiveness. 241 

if it has not fallen on you. And let us now observe, 
that a man's love for Jesus must be in proportion to 
his conviction of the danger from which Jesus has 
saved him, and the guilt which Jesus has cleansed 
away; and this conviction does not depend upon 
the mere quantity of our sins forgiven, but upon 
the sense of them, which we entertain. If we think 
that Jesus has really forgiven us but little, our love 
will be small ; but if we have been once deeply 
pierced with the feeling of our ingratitude to Christ, 
if we have looked upon our sins in the light of that 
piety which has sought to save us, then we shall feel 
that there is but little difference between us and the 
darkest sinner. We shall be pressed by the urgency 
of a common need, and whether the sea beneath us 
be one fathom or a thousand fathoms deep, we shall 
cry like Peter, " Save, Lord, or I perish ! " When a 
man of exemplary morals was once wrestling for for- 
giveness, a friend of his asked him, " What have you 
done that you should beg so for mercy?" " I have 
done enough," said he, "if I have done no more than 
live half my life slighting the mercy of my Saviour." 
And do not all our sins, great or small, culminate 
in this, that they blind us to the entreating love of 
Jesus ? 

This is the great charge which lies against you to- 
day, my unconverted friends. You stand, like Simon, 
looking askance at greater sinners than yourselves, 
and comforting yourselves with the thought that you 
cannot need much grace, it will not be a very hard task 
for you to enter into the kingdom. But if ever Jesus 



242 sinker's love, saviour's forgiveness. 

shall find you willing to be drawn to him, the day 
yon kneel before him and beg for forgiveness, you 
will think of no other sinner, you will find no place 
too low, no seat too humble for you, all your morali- 
ties will be forgotten, and you will come saying, — 

" Just as I am, without one plea 

Save that thy blood was shed for me, 
O Lamb of God, I come, I come." 



JACOB WRESTLING WITH GOD. 



"And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with Mm 
until the breaking of the day. And when he saw that he pre- 
vailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh, and the 
holloio of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him. 
And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And lie said, I will 
not let thee go except thou bless me." — Genesis xxxii, 24-26. 

Here is one of those episodes in the sacred story 
which seem so thickly veiled from our penetration, 
and to hide their meaning so securely from our eager 
search. Why do these bits of mosaic, which are set 
into the ground-plan of the Scriptures, as if to 
heighten the general effect by a little vivid, and some- 
times quaint and curious coloring, so often appear to 
us unintelligible, as if they had no meaning for us 
whatever, and had been framed in their places only 
by some inscrutable vagary of the mind which 
presided over the work? Why do we discover so 
mucli uncertainty in our attempts to explain these 
minor pieces of the wonderful architecture of the 
Old Testament ? I believe one reason is not very far 
to seek. It is that these little episodes come out 
into such relief on the pages of Scripture, they are 
generally set forth with such abruptness, are often, 
in look, in tone, and in effect so much like fragments 



244 JACOB WRESTLING WITH GOD. 

of an older building cemented in the wall of a more 
recent structure, just as the modern palaces of 
Home show the remains of ancient temples and por- 
ticos cropping out of modern brick and mortar, 
and they have such an air of recondite significance, 
they look as it they meant so much more than the 
rest of the history, that I believe we go to them 
determined, predetermined, to make great myste- 
ries of them, and dissatisfied if we cannot discover 
in them something exceedingly profound and very 
extraordinary. It is the same mood precisely which 
makes an antiquary start at every old, half-defaced 
inscription, and ready to see in every time-soiled 
relic of marble some hieroglyphic of ancient wis- 
dom. We are not willing to take the plain meaning 
which lies on the surface ; we are not willing to read 
the characters in good mother English, but we wish 
to m ike Greek or Runic of them, and work out an 
interpretation which will sound as strange as the setting 
of the story looks, and be as far from the common - 
sense of to-day as that setting is from our own actual 
manners and customs. We forget that the Bible 
teaches eternal truths, — truths which are the same in 
all languages and under all symbols, which, like the 
sun's light and warmth, are constant in their nature, 
and common for all hearts, whether they stream 
through the antique, colored window of Jewish story 
or through the clear transparency of Jesus' teaching 
in the New Testament. And when we are content 
to rest in those great lessons which are meant to be 
the wisdom aud guide of the world, we can look at 



JACOB WRESTLING WITH GOD. 245 

any part of the Bible, and see there some reflection 
of these great lessons. Every little fragment of the 
story has caught the glow of these universal truths, 
and every episode is tinged and dyed with some one 
color of the all- overhanging rainbow of God's one, 
chief, greatest message to a fallen and struggling 
race. 

All this I say with no intention to deny that sin- 
gular quaintness which belongs to this story of Jacob's 
wrestling with the angel ; but I believe the quaint- 
ness is altogether in the external character of the 
story. It is a unique story. There is nothing else 
like it in all the Bible. And there does appear to be 
something a little beyond surprise in the feeling with 
which we gradually overtake the end, the denouement 
of the narrative, and find that a mortal man has been 
wrestling with his God ; and I suppose it is this 
feeling which has tempted so many to turn this plain 
history into a sort of parable, or an allegory, or a 
dream, or a kind of charade, and then labor so hard 
to explain what they have first made perfectly inex- 
plicable. Let us rather try to make the story explain 
itself, and let us look at it with our own direct vision, 
not with the aid of prisms and spectroscopes, and see 
if here also, as everywhere else, we cannot discern 
a reflection of the great truths of all God's revela- 
tion. 

Jacob was, at this time, on his way to meet his 
brother, and it is especially needful for us to know 
in what mood of mind, with what feelings, he was 
proceeding. The history does not leave this in doubt. 



246 JACOB WRESTLING WITH GOD. 

Jaco') was in no happy frame. He carried a heavy 
weight upon his conscience as well as on his heart. 
He remembered the wrong he had done to Esau, and 
the remembrance disquieted him. He knew the na- 
tive wildness, the Bedouin roughness, that charac- 
terized Esau, and he knew that he was not a man 
likely to forgive or forget the injuries he had suffered. 
Guilt always makes a man timid, and even cowardly, 
in the presence of the avenger ; and though this guilt 
of Jacob had been washed out by tears and purged 
awajr by trials, and forgiven by a merciful God, 
yet now, in the circumstances which revived all 
those old memories of the deceit and fraud which 
Jacob had practised, his sense of guilt reawoke, and 
alarmed him and shook him with fear at the coming 
of Esau. 

And at this hour of apprehended peril, while the 
habits of the patriarch hold him fast to his covenant 
with God, and he tries what prayer can do to still the 
tumult of his soul, it is easy to see that his trust 
in God, if not weakened, is overshadowed, and his 
prayer itself betrays with what agitating ascendency 
the fear of his brother dominated the thought of 
God. " Deliver me, I pray thee, from the hand of 
my brother, from the hand of Esau, for I fear him." 
This is the burden of his prayer, and he seems now 
to remember God's promises, and to use them, only 
as so many advantages to be turned to account in 
the special pleading which runs through his prayer. 
Plainly, here is a crisis, not in the fortunes only, but 
in the faith of Jacob. The apprehension of Esau 



JACOB WRESTLING WITH GOD. 247 

has come between him and God, and his hold on the 
covenant is now enfeebled, and his confidence grown 
so infirm, that he commits that error which was so 
displeasing and offensive to God, and which God so 
terribly rebuked and pnnished, long afterwards, in 
the case of David. He seems to doubt that arm which 
has so often girdled him, and hedged him in from 
his enemies ; he seems to distrust that power which 
has so often delivered and preserved him, and he 
turns from God to seek safety in craft, in his own 
subtlety, in a stroke of policy and strategy, and so 
he divides his company and flocks and herds, and 
hopes to save half, in this way, if he cannot save all. 
And only after he has done this, does he betake him- 
self to prayer. First, he makes his arrangements to 
suit himself, and then he asks God to arrange his 
affairs for him ; first, he follows his own counsels, 
and then he entreats God to be his counsellor. 

jNow that was more human than patriarchal. Do 
we not very often do the same thing ? We do not 
pray to God, " O Lord, show me what is right, 
help me choose the right, and bless me in it ! " but 
we say, "I have chosen what was desirable to me, 
and now help me feel that it is right ; yea, be 
pleased to make it right ! " And in our times of trial, 
of doubt, of perplexity, our prayers catch that same 
infection of selfish weakness which made Jacob so 
anxious, not to hold fast to God, but to hold God 
fast to him. We see the evil, but we do not see the 
mercy. We see but one way to escape, and we pray 
God to save us just in that one way, and are slow to 



248 JACOB WRESTLING WITH GOD. 

believe God can deliver in any other. So when a 
great grief falls upon us, we feel the anguish, and we 
can feel little else, and we say, " Surely this is an 
unmitigated evil. There is no mercy here." And 
we let our suffering sense obtrude itself before our 
faith, and our shortsightedness condemns the eternal 
and infinite counsels of God. So Jacob made all 
his arrangements, and issued his last orders for the 
ensuing day, and then "he was left alone," — left 
alone, but no doubt because he willed to be alone. 
In the anxiety of that hour, he wished to be master 
of his own thoughts. Would he have been so anx- 
ious if he had kept his heart sweet and clear by a 
submissive trust in the God of his fathers ? Could 
he have been so anxious if he had held fast that old 
feeling of nearness to God which once brought angels 
down to sentinel his couch on the stony earth and 
opened a visible communication with heaven by 
means of that wondrous ladder? Where was the 
faith which had painted on the midnight sky these 
glowing visions of divine love, and where the joyful 
gratitude which had watched these visions as God 
turned them into substance and sealed their truth 
with the confirmation of living reality? In this 
eclipse of faith, this occultation, this shadowing of 
religious trust, well might Jacob feel anxious ; for 
it is a truth that not to feel anxious in presence of 
danger is the proof, as it is the outgrowth, either of 
sheer insensibility or of the highest and calmest 
laith in God. Half-way exercises are as futile in re- 
ligion as they are in art or in business. Carry a bold 



JACOB WRESTLING WITH GOD. 249 

hand, if you mean to strike home with a close, clean- 
cut, or a staggering blow. Cany a bold heart, brave 
in its confidence, courageous in its trust, if you mean 
to face evil and hope to overcome it. Rise above 
your grief, and look humbly up to your heavenly 
Father, and he will then lift you and exalt you where 
you could not have stood but with some great trouble 
under your feet. Faith, trust, cheerfulness, these 
are the very rounds of Jacob's ladder, and these 
the golden rays that shot through the visions of 
Bethel. 

But Jacob saw no ladder now, and no vision of 
ministering angels ; and yet, far as he seemed to 
have strayed from God, God was not far from him. 
God gives up no one because of some momentary 
weakness, but he seems to stand by the side of an 
erring child till his error or his sin has brought him 
fairly to extremities, and then he shows himself; 
but sometimes, by as painful an exhibition as He 
made to Jacob, and if not so palpably, just as con- 
vincingly, he shows us that we, too, with all our 
mortal weakness and human self-confidence, have 
been struggling with the Almighty and seeking to 
overcome him. "Jacob was left alone." And sud- 
denly there came forth one who seemed to Jacob a 
man, unknown to him, of course, and who at once 
seized him and began to wrestle with him. Out 
there, in the star- gilt darkness of the night, took place 
that strange contest between the patriarch and the 
stranger. Hour rolled on after hour, and still it con- 
tinued, nor until the returning sun began to light 



250 JACOB WRESTLING WITH GOD. 

up the east did these combatants know each other or 
cease from their toils. 

Noav let me state, first, what seems to me to be the 
sufficient explanation of the singular way in which 
God here reaches and probes the fainting heart of 
Jacob and restores his wavering confidence. 

It seems to us a very peculiar mode of enforcing a 
religious truth ; and yet I can see, I think, its emi- 
nent adaptation to the time, and to the opinions and 
feelings of the time. Physical strength then, as for 
so long afterwards, was everything in the estimation 
of a man's gifts and qualities, and wrestling was the 
one peaceful and favorite mode of displaying it. The 
greatest heroes of old Greece, like the magnificent 
Dorieus, were the men who had won the crown for 
superiority in the wrestling and boxing matches which 
made part of the famous Olympic games. It is very 
easy to see that in this respect Greece might have been 
the pupil of the patriarchs, so manifest among her sons 
is the admiration entertained for all feats of physical 
prowess, — the same sentiment which gave such un- 
qualified praise to the youthful exploits of David, and 
which lifted Samson into his niche in the temple of 
national heroes. I have no doubt that Jacob was a 
strong man and a skilful wrestler, and as little doubt 
that he could be reached through his pride in these 
abilities as effectively, perhaps, as in any other way. 

Of course, our ideas are. all changed now, but we 
must not carry back our ideas into those old ages, 
and make them the tests of what was or was not fit 
and becoming. God speaks to every age and every 



JACOB WRESTLING WITH GOD. 251 

people in its own language, but he always speaks 
the same truths, and it were as foolish for us to com- 
plain that God has not used our ideas and our man- 
ners as to find fault because he has not given the 
Scriptures in English, rather than in Hebrew and 
Greek. We do not hesitate to translate the Hebrew 
and Greek : very well, let us learn to translate the old 
ideas and the old manners. 

Jacob wrestled on, probably with a vain reliance 
on his undoubted strength and a growing hope of 
final success, but he did not know with whom he 
was contending. And did not God mercifully and 
instructively deal with this wrestler as he often deals 
with us, when we ignorantly and blindly attempt to 
resist and overthrow him in his hard providences? 
He does not crush us in our folly, he lets us go on 
struggling, murmuring at our difficulties, trying one 
resource after another, seeking to crown our foolish 
hope with attainment. But if we will persist, in the 
darkness, if we will not yield to him without feeling 
his power, ah ! then he serves us just as he served 
Jacob. He knows where our weakness lies, he 
knows where his hand, if it be once laid, will wither 
the strength in our bodies, dry the very marrow in 
our bones, and bring us to the ground with a convic- 
tion that it is vain to contend against God. 

He knows where to find that one spot of infirmity 
which lies nearest to our best and humblest feelings, 
and he puts forth his hand and touches us, and our 
nerves shiver, and our muscles shrink, and our hearts 
cry out, " It is, it is the hand of the Lord ! He 



252 JACOB WRESTLING WITH GOD. 

doeth all things well." He touched Jacob, and under 
that touch, as he felt his strength depart and all his 
confidence me it into trembling weakness, Jacob's eyes 
were opened, his faith recovered its old keenness, 
and he knew it was no mortal who had overcome him, 
and he seems to have said at once in his heart, " Now 
God has shown how blindly and. wickedly I have 
been setting myself against him, how foolishly I 
have been trusting to my own strength and distrust- 
ing him. I have here been wrestling with him all 
night, and yet at one light touch of his linger he has 
blasted all my strength and my confidence. If he 
overcomes me, can he not overthrow my brother? 
Has not Esau, too, some weak spot which God can 
find out, and may not God show him also that he is 
contending with a power mightier than mine, and able 
to bruise him as it has bruised me ? " In some such 
way does Jacob seem to have reasoned. All his old 
faith and trust started up afresh. He saw his errors, 
he humbled himself, and he came back to the old 
sense of nearness to God, and cried out to the de- 
parting angel, "I will not let thee go except thou 
bless me ! " His hard trial had at length brought 
him again face to face with his God, and he clung to 
him with resolute, and importunate, and happily 
prevailing earnestness of faith and desire ; and from 
that night of strange experience he came forth, no 
longer Jacob, " the supplanter," but Israel, " the 
Prince of God," and with a pledge and assurance 
of power with God and with men. 

Friends and brethren, I fear there are some of us 



JACOB WRESTLING WITH GOD. 253 

who are, like Jacob, blindly wrestling with God. We 
are following our own counsels and setting our hearts 
upon the accomplishment of our plans. Our faith 
is weak and we distrust, yea, we distrust the mercy 
and the power of God. Would it be strange if God 
should search out our weakness, and by soft and yet 
paralyzing stroke, touch us into remembrance of what 
we have forgotten, and send us limping on in life, 
crippled just where we felt strongest, and pained 
where we felt most proudly and vainly? Would it 
be strange? Has not God touched some of these 
wrestlers with him, and will they still keep up the 
struggle and refuse to own his hand ? 

But there are some who have learned this lesson, 
who have won, by sorrow and with tears, that price- 
less blessing which crowns submission and faith after 
long wrestling. They have had their dark night of 
struggling with a gloomy mystery, which has almost 
thrown them prostrate, which has taxed all their faith 
and hardihood of courage. They have thrown out 
their arms, only to grapple the air ; they have planted 
their feet, only to slide down a precipice. But they 
have not lost their heart of faith and confidence, and 
at last they too have looked up, and seen the streaks 
of the morning, seen God's harbinger walking up the 
slopes of day, and unfurling the sunny banners of 
hope, and peace, and happiness. They have not let 
the angel go till they had obtained a blessing. Let 
ns remember that the morning is sure to come to us 
if we wait for it. 

We may have flung ourselves against the messen- 
11 



254 JACOB WRESTLING WITH GOD. 

gers of God, we may have been wrestling against 
God ; but let us rekindle our faith, let us give up con- 
fidence in our own strength, let us hold fast the gra- 
cious angel who is dealing with us, and cease not 
entreating him till he has left with us that blessing 
of God which we desire. 



ORPAH AND RUTH. 



"And Orpah kissed her mother-in-law: but Buth clave to her." — 
Ruth i, 14. 

This is the introduction to one of the most de- 
lightful pastorals to be found in any language, a 
poem in everything save metre, and with the charm 
of an antique simplicity, with a pictorial vividness 
and a home-telling power of truthfulness to nature, 
to which neither rhythm nor rhyme could add a 
grain of sense or eloquence. Thanks for this Book 
of Euth, set in the midst of the Old Testament like 
a jewel within a rim of gold, small as a gem, but 
as bright as a gem, and as clean-cut and clear-pol- 
ished as ever left the workshop of a poetical lapidary. 
Generally, in reading the books of the Old Tes- 
tament, we see but little of the inner life of the 
people. There is a screen of political events 
which shuts it out from us, except at a few, oc- 
casional points, where we can just peep through 
some narrow loop-hole, and get a few glimpses. But 
here in this small book there is no screen at all, there 
is no jealous lattice- work in the window ; the inlook is 
as free as the outlook, and the eye can settle itself 
unforbidden upon all the little domestic and social 



256 OKPAH AND RUTH. 

economics which are elsewhere curtained round with 
privacy. 

Our present purpose requires, however, only the 
outlines of the first part of the story, the story of 
what happened in Israel while yet the judges were 
ruling, about 1300 years before Christ. There was 
a famine in the land, drought had fallen on the corn- 
fields, or perhaps the Midianites had made one of 
their many raids into the country, and emptied the 
granaries and the cattle-folds. We learn from the 
history of Gideon, who at last smote these Midianites, 
and swept them with the besom of his wrath across 
the Jordan, with what difficulty the poor Israelite had 
to struggle in the task of earning bread, with one eye 
on the plough, and the other on the neighboring hill- 
top, hiding his corn in the wine-vats, and thrashing 
by night, and often going out to look for that circle 
of black-skinned tents which gave him such terrible 
warning of the havoc and ruin that were coming. 
From this or some other cause there was a famine in 
the land, and it bore hard upon the sons of Ephraim 
in Bethlehem- Judah, and Elimelech, probably a man 
advanced in years, and not undistinguished in his 
family and kinship, went into the country of Moab, 
taking with him his wife and two sons. The Moabites, 
as you know, idolatrous as they were, were blood con- 
nections of the Israelites, and held a rich and pros- 
perous territory across the Jordan. They were often 
at war with the Israelites, and yet they seem never to 
have quite forgotten the bond of consanguinity, and 
they often gave a hospitable welcome to their neigh- 



ORPAH AND RUTH. 257 

bors and kinsmen in times of pressure and calamity. 
To the fertile valleys and the multitudinous flocks of 
Moab, E lime lech fled from the jaws of famine. 

Certainly it was not a very extended flight ; it was 
nothing like the hegira which, fifty years ago, used 
to unpeople the rocky farms of New England to furnish 
staple for the giant States of the West ; and nothing 
can better help us to an adequate notion of the very 
small and contracted theatre on which G)d has made 
pass before the world the wonderful scenes and act- 
ors in the Bible drama, than the attempt to bring 
the geography of Palestine within the field of our 
own personal observation, and to set it to a scale 
drawn out on our own ample stretch of land and 
water. Going from Bethlehem to the Jordan River, 
was only going from Fall River to the sea at New- 
port ; and flying from hunger in Judah to corn in 
Moab was no more than may have been done by 
many a farmer in Westport, in the old days, who 
carried his bags across the Taunton River, and got 
them filled. So that there is no significance in 
Elimelech's journey, though there is great signifi- 
cance in its terminus among the old enemies of 
Israel; and we may believe that only a hard necessity 
would have driven him thither. We are told how 
the family remained in Moab ten years. And 
Elimelech died there ; and then the sons mar- 
ried there, and they, too, died there ; and Naomi was 
left alone with her two daughters-in-law. This triple 
affliction of the poor widow seems to have been 
regarded by her as a judgment from God, as if she 



258 ORPAH AND RUTH. 

believed that God had thus punished her family for 
entering into even a temporary compact with a race of 
uncircumcised heathen. "The hand of the Lord," she 
exclaims, " hath gone out against me ! " and she re- 
solves to return to her own country, and end her days 
in the shadow of Jehovah's sanctuary. 

Now comes the artless discussion with her two 
daughters-in-law, in which we see so beautifully 
brought out the traits of two diverse characters, one 
commonplace, and without a tone which surpasses the 
average female character ; the other, touched with a 
powerful hand, exalted to the very ideal of feminine 
grace and feminine faithfulness, and finished with one 
of those rare strokes of conspiring genius and felici- 
tous art which make a picture immortal. Naomi 
evidently shrinks from the thought of taking her 
Moabitish daughters into the land of her fathers, 
though this shrinking is by no means so strong as to 
show itself on the surface of her mournful pleading 
with them. On the contrary, she seems only con- 
cerned, with a true mother's self-renouncing affec- 
tion, for their welfare. Her heart has learned to 
build itself upon their love, and she yearns for their 
companionship. 

Probably, in this household of Israel, they have left 
off their idolatrous practices, and suffered their old 
religion to drop into a slumberous, inarticulate pas- 
siveness ; but it is plain they have yet gone no 
further than this, and have made no open renuncia- 
tion of the gods of Moab, or any profession of faith 
in the Jehovah of their husbands and their mother- 



OEPAH AND RUTH. 259 

in-law. They are come now to the crisis in their his- 
tory, and just as, when a man is halting between two 
opinions, his decision is often reached, not by the 
royal road of reason, and argument, and reflection, 
but by some short cut of emotion, affection, or sym- 
patic, so for these two daughters everything hangs 
upon the impromptu response which love has to 
make to the noble and self-denying woman whose 
tears are refuting the broken voice which bids them 
leave her. Only one of them has hesitated at all. 
She sees her mother's tears, but she has a keener 
sense for her mother's words. She seems quite will- 
ing to be persuaded, and at length goes up to her 
mother and kisses her, and turns her back upon her 
forever. 

Not so with the other; she stands as if rooted to 
her place, and when Naomi, in tenderly sad and dis- 
consolate words, says to her, "Thy sister-in-law is 
gone back unto her people and unto her gods ; re- 
turn thou unto thy sister-in-law," Kuth breaks out 
with her impassioned, yet steadily deliberate vow, 
K Whither thou goest, I will go ; where thou lodgest, 
I will lodge : thy people shall be my people, and thy 
God my Grod ; where thou diest will I die, and there 
will I be buried. The Lord do so to me and more 
also, if aught but death part thee and me." 

In spite of the three thousand years which have 
piled their dust and ashes over this brave daughter of 
Moab, the mother of kings, and the star-gleam of a 
line of glory that rose and flashed over the plains to 
Bethlehem, the winds have not swept her words 



260 ORPAH AND RUTH. 

away. Passion has been speaking since in all tongues, 
love has been pouring itself in song and in dirge, human 
tenderness has wreathed itself with the choicest gar- 
lands of eloquence ; yet the world has not found, the 
heart has not answered, so sweet a spirit, wrapped in 
such a power of graceful and compelling language, as 
that which breathes and flames in these words of Ruth. 
We can tell when we are in mid-ocean by the color of 
the water, and we can tell by the intense coloring of 
this speech what depths of faith, and loyalty, and love, 
lay in the character of Ruth. Worthy was she, thrice 
worthy, to become the remote mother of our Lord 
and Saviour, and to set up for us, back in the dim 
centuries, a radiant image of love, never eclipsed 
save when her mighty descendant after the flesh was 
lifted upon the cross. 

But I ask you now to examine the contrast between 
the two characters presented to us in this narrative, 
and to judge whether there be not something instruc- 
tive here which we may learn. 

In the first sister we have the impersonation of 
what we shall call the sentiment of habit and attach- 
ment, which passes everywhere, in characters like 
hers, under the name of love, but which is in very 
truth, not love, but the mere sentiment of it; the 
difference between the two being just the difference 
between a coal of fire and a lucifer match out 
of which you can get a fire only by friction. Blow 
upon your live coal, and it blushes out redder and 
redder, and Avaxes hotter and hotter; blow upon 
your lucifer, and it goes out into darkness. Senti- 



ORPAH AND RUTH. 261 

ment of any kind is a thin gloss which lies on the 
surface of feeling like a varnish ; it does not go be- 
yond the senses, it does not strike through the inte- 
rior tissues, and color its way down to the heart. 
It comes in from without, from circumstances, from 
education, from the daily phases of life, a mere mo- 
tion of the soul which takes up and repeats the 
motion of the world around it, and which looks like 
deep, genuine feeling, just as water in the Croton 
reservoir looks like water from a living spring. And 
alas ! how much mere Croton water there is in the 
channels of human nature and of society ! How 
much semblance of feeling that proves only disguised 
affectation ; how much show of sympathy that van- 
ishes like the glittering gossamers of the morning ; 
how much shallow love that evaporates into idle pro- 
fession, and ends only in a kiss like Orpah's ! And 
I remark, in the first place, that the mere sentiment 
of love goes no further than a kiss. It throws itself 
on the lips. It warms itself in the eye. It learns 
from use and custom alone how to play on the keys 
of passion, and produce some weak but imposing 
imitation of the genuine music of the heart. There 
is no muscle in such love ; it is all nerve, and like 
every other feeling which has no conductor but the 
nerves, it thrills only in spasms, and is a thing of 
times and seasons. Can you not find examples in 
the sons and daughters, and brothers and sisters of 
many a household? Can you not find them in the 
members of the church, in those whose affection, 
sometimes flaring up like a well-shaken torch, is yet 
11* 



262 ORPAH AND RUTH. 

as intermittent as the light of a fire-fly, and needs a 
continual puff of fresh air, and a constant brushing 
away of dead cinders to keep it alive? Ask such 
love for a kiss, and you will get it, but ask it for 
that profound, sustained sympathy which the thirsty 
soul craves at times, and goes searching for like a 
well in the desert, and you find it not. When the 
daily tide in the household runs on smoothly, and 
there is no strain on the old cables of habit and duty, 
it is easy for son or daughter to pay the whole exte- 
rior homage of love ; but let the way grow rough, 
and life be jostled and jarred with cares and anxie- 
ties and worries, then comes the test of affection ; 
then does all feeling that merely simulates love, give 
its last kiss, and turn away forever. And when I 
look into the homes of poverty, hard, grinding, 
coarse, sordid poverty, where the children of toil 
pick their scant bread from their own bones, and 
eat it not alone in the sweat of their foreheads, but 
in bitter heart-sweat, when I look there, I do not 
wonder I see so little love, bat that I find so much 
that puts to shame the polished egotism that usurps 
the name of love in so many higher places. For the 
poor have wounds which no kisses can heal. They 
live in an atmosphere that chokes and strangles all 
sentiment and all superficiality of romantic feeling ; 
and if love springs up with that envelope around it, 
I know that it must be, not a sentiment of love, but 
a religion of love, pure as God's highest ether, and 
deep as man's largest capacity. And I remark, in 
the second place, that no mere sentiment of love is 



ORPAH AND RUTH. 263 

able to stand before the rush of trial and the stum- 
bling-blocks of difficulty. We want sinews to do 
that, not nerves alone. 

Probably Naomi, before she called up her children 
to take her leave of them, knew no difference be- 
tween them in their attachment to her. Orpah was 
as Ruth. But the difference came out when the poor 
widow, in the candor of her own affection, set her- 
self on one side and interest on the other, and asked 
her daughters to choose between the two. Then was 
the time for Ruth to speak out, and then was the 
time when Orpah sank into silence, and all the sweets 
of her love expired in a kiss. When a gallant war- 
rior lay dying on the field, in the arms of his son, 
seeing the en^my in the distance approaching the 
spot where he lay, he bade his son leave him and 
seek safety in flight ; but when his son appeared 
but too eager to take his advice, the father cried 
out, " Will you leave me, my son? Must I die here 
alone ? " How many hearts have sent up that mourn- 
ful cry when misfortune, and sorrow, and trouble 
have thrown them on the field, and left them there to 
perish ! Hearts of forsaken mothers and fathers , 
hearts of abandoned friends, hearts of christian 
brothers from whom every face of sympathy, every 
hand of help has withdrawn itself; and under the 
cloud of adversity, in the thick smoke of life's dan- 
gerous battle, how rare is the human love that stands 
fast by the fallen, and throws its arm around the suf- 
ferer, and out of the rich fulness, and with the quiet 
promptitude^ ot a resolute ^and unterrified heart, ex- 



264 ORPAH AND RUTH. 

claims with Ruth, " Where thou goest I will go, aucl 
where thou diest will I die." With what shudder- 
ing and loathing contempt we regard the treatment 
which Charles V, Emperor of Germany, gave to his 
own mother. It was for him a choice between a 
throne and his mother, aud he took the throne, and 
shut up his mother iu the cell of a lunatic, aucl left 
her to the tortures which an inhuman jailer inflicted 
for nearly fifty years of wretchedness. Filial love 
could not resist the glitter of that throne, and melted 
like the hoar-frost before the sun. There is no throne 
to tempt us, but there are splendors as keen and 
brilliancies as dazzling, before which the light of love • 
goes out on many a hearth-stone, and many a christian 
altar, and in the son's heart gold sits, where his mother 
once held her place, and the father's breast is a shrine 
where Mammon gets the offering he once gave to his 
children ; and on the christian's lips there is only a 
kiss for the Master and the church, ere he sets his 
face to the world, and goes back to pay his vows to 
the old gods. 

And if trial and peril and tribulation came to all 
of us, what swaths of desolation they would leave 
among us, — what windrows of dead branches, what 
heartless farewell kisses, as the sole remains oi 
that empty sentiment which hides itself in a gauzy 
ostentation of love. I remark, finally, that the great 
difference between the mere sentiment of love, and a 
vital, deeply earnest, devoted affection, is one which 
religion only can explain. 

I do not deny that there is ardent, clinging, death- 



OKPAH AND KUTH. 265 

less love, which knows little of a true religion ; there 
is a pure, soft humanity of love, which gathers up 
into one bundle of fibres all that is strongest in the 
passionate instincts of our nature, while yet it has 
not a single string in it that can awake a note of those 
higher strains which breathe over life the music of 
the spheres, and wed our hearts together in a sym- 
phony sublimer than man's earthly passions can ever 
know. I do not deny the existence of such a love, 
but it touches us only around a segment of our 
being ; it is too narrow to take us in the whole sweep 
of our existence and our destiny. It is only the vox 
humana in the organ ; it is only the flower on the 
stalk ; it is the love of joyous smiles and April showers 
of tears ; a love for life, not for death ; for the bloom- 
ing hours and the flitting shadows, not for the dark, 
deep, voiceless night of trouble and affliction. It is 
a love that leaves out the soul, and with all its fra- 
grance and its beauty, has no healing in it for man's 
sharpest aches and sternest needs, those that meet 
him wdien he is called to leave his household idols ; 
and all that an unreligious love can give him is a 
poor kiss upon his dying lips. Between this and a 
love which draws to itself all the elements of religion, 
there is that distinction which you may see between 
Orpah and Ruth. Even the names of those sisters 
are suggestive of this distinction. The one is Orpah, 
"young vitality, youthful freshness," and the other 
is Ruth, "friend of God," hinting to us the contrast 
which exists between the uncertainty and inconstancy 
of the most vigorous human powers, and the stead- 



266 ORPAH AND RUTH. 

fastness of a heart which is stayed on God. Could 
Orpah have said everything else, there was one thing 
she could not say, " Thy God shall be my God"; 
and therefore she turned again to her idols. And if 
mere human love gets its tenderest beauty, and its 
broadest scope, and its most unswerving loyalty 
from religion, I ask how there can be any true love 
for religion, for Christ, for the church, where the 
essential facts of religion are wanting? And this 
touches the case of many an unconverted man, who 
stands to-day, like Orpah, divided between his old 
gods and his old friends, and the divine call to a 
christian life. 

There is a sentiment in favor of Jesus, but it is too 
weak to take up the cross of self-denial. There is a gen- 
uine emotion that feels all the solemnity of the choice 
which the sinner is called to make, and sometimes rises 
and glows almost to the white heat of decision. 
There is a surge of penitent feeling which sweeps 
over the heart at the remembrance of the past, and 
almost breaks away at times the dikes of pride, and 
shame, and selfishness that constrain it. It would be 
strange if men did not have such moments of tumul- 
tuous feeling, when conscience kindles thought, and 
eternity bends its awful frown upon the sinner. 

But there is no virtue in all this. Let no such man 
flatter himself that he comes nearer the kingdom 
oecause his sentiments are in favor of it. Let no 
Orpah delude herself into the belief that she is true 
and faithful, because she seals her profession with a 
kiss. It is not a feeling toward God that brings the 



ORrAH AND RUTH. 267 

sinner to the cross, but a feeling' from God, and that 
is a grace which only repentance and self-renuncia- 
tion can bring. There is no true love for Christ that 
does not spring from Christ ; there is no affection for 
the church which does not cling to the church, and 
plant itself within it. There is no loyalty to our 
brethren which does not carry us into the midst of 
them, with our hands ready to work, our hearts beat- 
ing with sympathy, and our tongues prompt to declare 
like Ruth, "The Lord do so to me, and more also, if 
aught but death part you and me." 



PARABLE OF THE UNJUST STEWARD. 



Luke xvi, 1-12. 



This is one of the most interesting and instructive 
of all that series of masterly fictions in which the 
Saviour pictured and framed the lessons of wisdom, 
truth, and love. We have here a story that reads 
as fresh to-day as if it had been told only yesterday, 
the story of the shrewd bankrupt. The character is 
so true to life, the incidents are so faithfully in keep- 
ing with the character, the cunning and trickery are so 
like the arts which men use now, that one might be- 
lieve, with no great violence to probability, that the 
narrative had somehow fallen out of the private note- 
book of some hard-pushed or hard-pushing Wall Street 
or State Street broker. Like a great many brokers, 
this man comes upon the scene in somewhat embar- 
rassed circumstances. He had seen better clays, 
when the world had gone well with him. He had 
the management of a rich man's property, an im 
mense estate, all whose business was done by him, 
all whose profits passed through his hands, and if 
he had not made his office pay its expenses and his 
own, too, it had not been the fault of his modesty or 
his honesty. 



PARABLE OF THE UNJUST STEWARD. 269 

Probably, when ho entered into his office, he had 
a £,*ood conscience and clean hands He could show 
the best of references, and certificates of good moral 
character, indorsed by men of the first standing in 
society. He may even have had a good opinion of 
himself, which, when one deserves it, is at least equal 
to the best city references. 

So he took the keys of his office, and went about 
his work. 

Now we sometimes find innocence of life and 
character likened to a pure, unsullied, unwritten 
piece of white paper, and the simile may be a very 
good one, for some purposes. But the trouble prac- 
tically is, that innocence of life is often too decidedly 
and helplessly like a blank page of foolscap ; just as 
white and clean it may be, but, also, just as indif- 
ferently and passively and uselessly white and clean. 
The devil has not put his signature there, vice has 
not made its superscription, crime has not left its 
villanous autograph ; but this is only because the 
devil has not taken his time to make his mark, not 
because there is not abundant room for the sweep of 
his pen, and a very fair chance that a good oppor- 
tunity may be given him. Give us rather a page of 
life, a piece of paper that shows the ink-marks over 
its whole broad surface ; a good, legal scrap of parch- 
ment, filled up with an honest bond ; a substantial 
promise to pay, fortified with securities, and as cur- 
rent as a national bank-bill. Only let the marks be 
of the right kind, and the paper may be as yellow as 
the smoke of fuming years aud the dust of hard 



270 PARABLE OF THE UNJUST STEWARD. 

travel may make it ; only let it be a genuine issue of 
honest purpose and manly truthfulness, and when the 
spirit of evil sees it, he turns from it in disgust : 
he has been anticipated ; the ground has been occu- 
pied ; there is no occasion for him to trouble himself; 
the best he can do is merely to counterfeit it ; and he 
knows as well as others, that the most wretched and 
worst-paying counterfeits in this world are those 
which put on the air and color of honesty for the 
purpose of cheating ; and no forgery is baser than 
the hypocrisy which tries to serve the devil in the 
name of God. 

Now this steward went to his work with very little 
qualification but his native craftiness, managing skill, 
and perhaps a little experience from former service 
of the same kind ; and he met, at the start, the very 
kind of temptation which besets every young man of 
his stamp. For there is no union of qualities so sure 
to plunge a man into difficulties, and lay snares, and 
dig pitfalls for his honesty and his morality, as the 
union of great shrewdness and great selfishness. 
This steward had two fatal arts, which are certainly 
not now among the lost arts, and I am afraid, they 
never will be, — the art of making money fast, and 
the art of spending it faster than he made it; and 
unfortunately, these two arts follow each other so 
closely, that nothing but a good conscience can keep 
them apart. There is a great deal of misery in this 
world from the want of money ; but the want of mon- 
ey never yet ruined any man's character and ship- 
wrecked his soul ; but a full horn of plenty, a great 



PARABLE OF THE UNJUST STEWARD. 271 

cornucopia of cash, sets running a stream of mis- 
chief that sweeps away the honor, the health, the 
credit, the happiness, the souls of thousands. To get 
more money than we need, is always a temptation to 
need more than we get ; and a surplus of income is 
just like the waste lot of a man's farm, sure to be- 
come a nest of weeds, brambles, and rattlesnakes. 
" Give me neither poverty nor riches," cried a wise 
and holy man ; and if we are poor, may God give us 
this man's wisdom or his holiness ; if we are rich, 
then God give us both, for we need them. 

This steward ran a rapid race, and very soon found 
that his pay and perquisites were not enough to pro- 
vide means for his pleasured, and then came to him 
that critical ordeal of which so many of our young 
men could speak to us from a bitter experience; fur 
at this stage of his official history, the steward is the 
type of a character as common in our streets, our 
stores, our factories, as are the photographs in the 
artists' show-windows. A young man with .no fixed 
principles, and a very much fixed income, runs to 
what he calls pleasure, as naturally as waste water runs 
into the sewer. Start him with a light head and a 
heavy pocket, and he will soon come back with his 
condition just reversed, a light pocket and a heavy 
head ; for no amount of money is sufficient to save 
such a man from the heaven-ordained goal of the race 
he runs. Pleasure like his is as voracious as a 
famine, always crying, " Give, give " ; and when his 
own supply of funds fails him, when his honesty is no 
longer able to foot the bills of his folly, he reaches 



272 PARABLE OF THE UNJUST STEWARD. 

the point at which God calls him, and the devil com- 
pels him to pause awhile, and then make a peremp- 
tory decision. for good or for evil. He can stop now, 
if he will, and save himself. Up to this point he 
has been foolish and wicked, but he has not added 
crime to his folly. 

He has been a rogue, perhaps, but not a scoun- 
drel. He has injured himself, but he has not tried 
to injure others. The trouble is for such an one, 
that when he reaches this point, he has generally put 
himself so far under the power of circumstances 
that he feels obliged to go on a little longer. He 
will play one more stake. He has pawned his char- 
acter already, and he must redeem it. He has bought 
pleasure so far with good, honest, solid cash. Why 
should he not obtain it now on the credit of his 
wits? He has the vanity, perhaps, to think he can 
do what no other man ever yet did, that is, to steal, 
and not become a thief, to cheat, and not turn into a 
villain. For it is the wonderful logic of a fop's 
vanity to admire in one's self what one laughs at or 
despises in another; and many a man, or woman 
even, would lose half of her conceit, if she could but 
get a full outside view of her character or person, 
at a distance of sixteen and a half feet. But our 
tempted young man, having only an inside view of 
himself, not very well lighted up, except through 
the dusty skylights of his vanity, judges the dishon- 
est schemes he meditates by the good opinion he 
has of his own merits, and he fancies that roguery 
and fraud become half legitimate by being smothered 



PARABLE (F THE UNJUST STEWARD. 273 

in a blanket of virtuous resolutions. He must have 
money just now ; this once he will take it without 
earning it ; he will get it by the ancient craft of — 
Oh, call it not stealing, but sequestration; name it 
not vulgar forgery, but irresponsible penmanship ; 
denounce it not by the rude term of cheating, but 
call it more gently an abnormal extension of meum 
into luum! How easy it is for the young man, with 
this rose-water delicacy of treating and perfuming 
his early tricks of dishonesty, to become a first-rate 
artist with the least possible painstaking, till some 
fine morning, like the poor steward before us, he 
wakes up with the stern summons ringing in his ear, 
" Give an account of thy stewardship." 

But a rogue always dies hard, especially an old 
rogue. Like a burglar shut up in the cell with his 
bag of finely tempered tools, he is no sooner caught 
in his tricks, than he sets himself to work his way to 
escape by some trick more prodigious than the rest. 

This is just what the steward did. There are some 
men who contrive to live on their employers by 
cheating the public, and others contrive to live on 
the public by cheating their employers. The stew- 
ard had been living on his lord, mainly by swindling 
his lord's tenants. So he now took a turn, and set 
his wits to work at devising an ingenious way of 
living on the tenants by swindling his lord. Like 
a courageous rogue, he set his true condition before 
his eyes, and looked fairly at his prospects, and like 
a right royal fop he came speedily to this natural 
conclusion : " I cannot dig ; to beg, I am ashamed." 



274 PARABLE OF THE UNJUST STEWARD. 

Like many a man related to the sons of his father, 
the one useful thing he might have done in his ex- 
tremity, he had not the ability or the will to do ; 
and the only honorable alternative that was then left 
him, he had not the humility or the honesty to do. 

What he did do was, to transfer to himself obliga- 
tions that were due to his lord. He converted the 
tenants' legal debts to their landlord, into debts 
of honor to himself; and as it has alwaj^s been said 
there is honor among thieves, it is very probable that 
this arrangement was satisfactory to both parties, and 
that the ejected steward afterwards found a very 
comfortable living among the accomplices of his 
villany. 

Now, why does our Saviour tell this story? Why 
has he set before us this hard picture of unscrupu- 
lous dealing and ingenious trickery ? Certainly he 
could never mean to bestow a morsel of praise on a 
character like this !. So far from it, he has drawn its 
dishonesty with so unmistakable features, he has 
scored the portrait with lines so deep indented, that 
he has not judged it worth while to utter a word of 
condemnation. Human nature condemns it; every 
instinct of an honest heart condemns it ; the spirit 
of all law and order condemns it ; every sentiment 
of manhood, all loyalty to truth and good faith, con- 
demn it. This is enough, surely, and we have only 
to ask what the lesson is which Jesus taught by the 
help of this story. You remember how, in the story 
of the prodigal, Jesus has traced with graphic words, 
every one of which stands out like a painting of 



PARABLE OF THE UNJUST STEWARD. 275 

Hogarth, the young man's career of profligate in- 
dulgence and degrading misery. He did this only to 
lead us, by imp.essive stages, to that point in the 
story at which the real, vital interest begins, that 
point at which the young man, sick of his folly, and 
goaded by the stings of conscience, conies to himselt 
and exclaims, " I will arise. I will go to my father." 
So in this story the sin, and cunning, and fraud 
are brought in to give effect to the interest of that 
moment when the detected, disgraced, ejected steward, 
feeling himself on the verge of ruin, anxiously asks, 
" What shall I do ? " and then sets all his wits at 
work to discover some means of salvation. Of course 
a wise man so endangered, would be sure to do this, 
and of a good man- you naturally expect this display 
of common prudence. But the point here is, that 
even a knave, a spendthrift, a man who has lived like 
a fool, when the pinch of danger comes, has still 
sense and judgment enough to take care of the future. 
No matter how reckless of life a man may have been, 
if he knows he has but ten days to live, he grows ex- 
ceedingly anxious as to how and where he is to spend 
them ; and even the savage Wirtz, who had probably, 
as he said, when he was reigning as tormentor-general 
of our poor soldiers, and chief of the staff-of-death 
at Andersonville, often contented himself with the 
same kind of diet he dealt out to his starving prison- 
ers, even he, when he was sent to prison, became 
much troubled about his prison rations, and took great 
pains to guard against a restricted bill of fere. 

Even the worst of men, when necessity compels 



27 13 PARABLE OF THE UNJUST STEWARD. 

them, or danger threatens them, are prudent enough 
to make the best provision possible, though they look 
no further than the wants of the body. The same 
faculties they have used to gild their vices and screen 
their villany, they are prompt to use when the hand 
of discovery strips off their gilt and shows them as 
they are. 

And here, Christ would teach us, is the condemna- 
tion of all of us, that for our life, our reputation, 
our bread, we are wise enough to arm ourselves 
and fight with every weapon of strength and skill 
experience has taught us to use. The same cunning 
that broke the bank-safe and took the money out, 
breaks the jail and takes out the thief; the same 
sharp dealing that won a fortune, contrives to save 
it when endangered ; the same quick wit that took 
advantage of the market, afterwards takes advantage 
of the law and eludes the grasp of pursuing credit- 
ors ; everywhere you see what powers men have 
all brought into play by the exigencies of danger ; 
and even when, like the steward, a man has tempted 
danger by his own roguery, and provoked the re- 
venges of misery by his crimes, he has yet sense 
enough to stand by himself and seek to batfle the 
pursuit he cannot escape. But how do we act when 
the question takes hold, not on honor alone, or 
wealth, or life, hut on the pearl of great price, 
the hope of salvation, and the prospect of immor- 
tality? Here there is a peril that threatens us all, 
here is a necessity that gripes us with the death- 
less hand of destiny, here is an interest which 



PARABLE OF THE UNJUST STEWARD. 277 

language cannot measure ; yet before these thousands 
of men and women are as heedless as if God had 
denied sense to the human soul and confined it to 
the muscles and nerves, or as if the soul itself were 
a fiction and eternity a dream. Well did Jesus 
say, " The children of this world are wiser in their 
generation than the children of light." Probably the 
most earnest question the bankrupt steward ever 
asked was his cry, " What shall I do ? " He saw 
only the dark cloud that swept the horizon of his 
earthly hopes : he thought not of the storm that was 
gathering out of his sight, of a justice which no 
cunning can overreach and no crime escape. And 
there are now young men whose feet are going 
down to shame and disgrace as fast as time and their 
own passions can urge them, whose sole anxiety is 
lest they have to dig or to beg ; fast young men 
whose speed of living has compromised their hon- 
esty and added sin to folly, and compelled them 
to pay for pleasure with a bond of perpetual fear, 
a draft on future exposure and ruin. They know 
their risk already. Torture has begun in their 
hearts, and they hear everywhere a voice warning 
them of the pit they have digged for themselves 
and the retribution that hovers over the next turn in 
their road. Could we get admission to the private 
hours of these young men, could we wring from 
their pillows the sighs and tears that confess the 
pleadings of their better angels and betray their guilt 
and dread, we should want no stronger evidence 
to convince us that "the way of transgressors is 

12 



278 PARABLE OF THE UNJUST STEWARD. 

hard." And all the harder for this, which is another 
lesson taught ns here, that the man who has be°'un 
dishonestly and wickedly must go on so, if he do 
not stop short by repentance. The prudence of the 
steward could neither save him from detection nor 
give him honest means to avert the consequences of 
his villany. He had chosen his tools, and he was 
obliged to use them just as they were. You can fight 
fire with fire, you can neutralize poison with poison, 
but no such treatment can possibly save a sinner. 
He cannot cure one sin by another. He cannot avert 
shame and ruin by new devices of cunning and crime. 
There is but one possible remedy. He must turn in 
his path, turn at once. " Turn ye, for why will ye 
die?" 

The day is near when the stewardship of life will 
be demanded of us. How are we using it now, for 
our Lord or for ourselves ? and what care have we 
taken that when the substance of this world dis- 
solves into the shadow of death, we may find room 
for our souls in the " everlasting habitations " on high ? 



THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 



11 Come, see a man that told me all that ever I did. Is not this the 
Christ ?" — John iv, 29. 

These words were spoken by one of the most 
remarkable of all the converts of Jesus, one whose 
sudden conversion is not so much explained as it is 
illustrated and beautified by the fact that the con- 
vert was a woman. But then she was a woman of 
Samaria; and though a wonrvn, even if a Samaritan, 
must carry the tender, sensitive, intuitive, quickly 
responsive heart of a woman, yet I think the Sa- 
maritan element must be a little more stubborn, a 
little harder to be overcome in the heart of a wo- 
man, than in that of a man. There seems to be this 
difference between the prejudices of a woman and 
those of a man, that her prejudices can be melted 
out of her, while those of the man must be drilled 
and chiselled out of him, with the steel bits and 
wedges of logic ; and as logic is cheaper than love, I 
think the hard-headed man a more hojDeful subject 
than the hard hearted woman. And I believe this 
woman of Samaria had gone to the ancient well of 
Jacob a thoroughly hard-hearted woman. For she 
not only had her heart overlaid with all the tenacious 



280 THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 

prejudices of her race, but she had these prejudices 
themselves overlaid and pressed down upon her by 
the misfortunes and the guilt of her life. There is 
nothing so narrowing and stifling as the sense of 
wrong-doing. Give the soul a wrong bias at the 
start, and every sin adds a little to the twist, till at 
length the original vice is rolled and wound around 
the heart like the coils of an anaconda. 

The meeting of this woman and Je>us looks like a 
mere accident. She certainly did not know whom 
she was to find at the well, but are we permitted 
to say Jesus did not know who was coming out of 
Sychem to meet him there ? If it was an accident, 
then it was one of those merciful accidents of which 
life is full. For in our own hearts, when they are 
stung by our follies, when they are cankered with our 
sins or oppressed with our griefs and trials, there 
does seem to lie an unconscious power of direction, 
a power that insensibly drives us toward the help and 
the hope which we need ; that seizes on the daily 
habits and the common ways of our life, takes up 
the most familiar offices and the most trivial drudger- 
ies, and turns them into the instruments of its won- 
der-working ; waylays us, if I may say so, in the path 
that leads to the well, and sets our faces straight toward 
the gracious Providence which is able to bless us and 
to save us. The best thinsg in life often come to us 
as surprises. The brightest visions, the dearest joys, 
spring up where we had no thought to find them, 
sometimes out of our bitterest cold and gloom, as 
flowers out of the snow- crusts. We think we ar 



THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 281 

only going to the well, when we are going to meet 
Jesns, and a light service is turned at once into a 
priceless memory and an immortal hope. 

Whether we know it distinctly or not, our great 
necessities are the envelopes of a power that urges 
us Godward. The darker it is around us, the more 
do we seek the light, and our troubles and sorrows 
are like the stones that crush a young plant ; it can 
escape from them only in one direction, and that is 
towards the sun. And God watches these struggling 
germs in us, and often, when we are almost ready to 
despair, surpiises them into sudden release and 
rapid development. So was Luther surprised out 
of his soul-sickness of doubt and perplexity into the 
vigorous health and energy of a christian manhood. 
He was crushed in spirit, and went groping among 
the cloisters of the old monastery until he found that 
old convent Bible, and the imprisoned truth flashed, 
like the morning beam, into his soul. 

Jesus seems to have come upon men often with 
just such surprises. He found his first disciples toil- 
ing at their nets, and his greeting and his call were 
mingled in the first words he spoke jto them, "Fol- 
low me, " So he found Zaccheus, sitting among the 
branches of the tree, and hoping, not for a gracious 
word from the Master, but only for a passing view of 
him, and his heart must have thrilled when Jesus said 
to him, "Come down. This day is salvation come to 
thy house." So did Jesus come upon Matthew, sit- 
ting at the receipt of custom, and arouse him from 
his money-changing with the simple but imperative 



282 THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 

summons, " Follow me." Jesus was acting here upon 
his knowledge of the hearts of men. There was a 
chord here waiting to be struck by his master-hand. 
There was a door here ready to open at his first 
knocking. There was a willingness here which 
needed but a word to awaken it out of unconscious- 
ness and kindle it into ardent and earnest recogni- 
iont and cheerful obedience. 

But let us not forget that all these surprises find 
us in the path of duty ; there only does Jesus meet 
us. The duty may be one of the cheapest and most 
trivial: that matters not, great or small, coarse or 
graceful, duty always looks toward God, and if it be 
no more, it is at least the path which leads to the 
well, where we may find the Saviour. 

Let us inquire now what it was which served to 
reveal Christ to the woman. And here it is of some 
importance to emphasize the fact that this revelation 
of Jesus, as the Christ, was made to a woman. For 
it seems to sustain a certain relation to the general 
series of evidence and testimony recorded by the 
evangelists. 

How often you read of the profound impression 
which was produced on men by the miracles of 
Jesus. They seemed almost universally to look for 
and to criticise narrowly the broadest and most pal- 
pable marks of Jesus' divine character and mission. 
The rulers were anxious to weigh his claims in the 
balance against the hard, rough, iron weights of most 
vulgar appreciation. They were used to deal with 
visible facts, and to hew and square evidence by the 



THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 283 

chalk-line of business rules. They cared little for 
any hidden charm or grace, any interior divinity, 
and were clamorous only for an imposing outside. 

Herod was utterly blind to the matchless power 
and beauty of Jesus' spirit ; and yet if he had had 
his request granted, and seen some great miracle 
wrought by Jesus, he might have interposed to save 
him; and after the resurrection, Thomas himself, 
one of Jesus' intimate twelve, seemed unable, stur- 
dy, dull-headed sceptic that he was, to link the 
risen Jesus with the Master he had followed by any 
identities of the spirit, but insisted on the correspond- 
ences of the flesh. You never find a woman making 
any such demand as this. Out of that broad circle 
of* womanly tenderness and devotion which glows, 
like a belt of stars, around the figure and person of 
the Master, there never came a suspicion of doubt or 
even of hesitation. And to all the cavils of men 
which historic fidelity has left in the pages of the 
New Testament, we oppose the unanimous verdict, 
the spontaneous acknowledgment, the unwavering 
loyalty of the women, whose pride it was to love and 
whose joy it was to serve their honored Lord. The 
men may have felt more keenly the convincing power 
of miracle ; but the women, with sharper insight, 
with subtler, quicker perceptions, with delicate, high- 
strung sensibility to charms for which flesh is too dense 
a medium, and a spiritual magnetism too fine to be 
tested by mere nerve and muscle, the women bowed 
with half-divine instinctiveness to the spirit of the 
Saviour. Not by the splendor of miracle were they 



284 THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 

attracted, not by the outward and manifest wonders 
of power were they subdued into faith ; but by the 
deeper, purer, rarer, diviner potencies and graces 
which, to their penetrating eyes, looked out from the 
mighty yet gentle spirit of their Lord. We have the 
testimony of the men ; add to it the testimony of the 
women, and we have the convergence of two lines of 
evidence, proceeding from both sides of Jesus' char- 
acter. We have all that humanity can witness as to 
the visible power and the indwelling spirit of our 
Lord Jesus Christ; and it seems to me that the testi- 
mony in our text is essentially the woman's testimony. 
Look carefully at the words, "Come, and see — " 
It is a perfectly inartificial and most emotional utter- 
ance. You can almost catch the rush and nervdus 
impetuosity of the woman's eagerness. You can 
almost see her as she beckons to her listeners, with 
half-imperious gesture, and w 7 ith one hot charge of 
breath, tries, but only tries, to convey some intel- 
ligible idea of the wonderful Jesus. She cannot stop 
to analyze the process by which her faith has been 
conquered ; she can oniy tell by what open steps 
Jesus has won his way to her heart ; so she exclaims, 
" Come and see a man that told me all that ever I 
did " ; and here seems to pause as if she felt she was 
telling, in fact, the poorest and least marvellous part 
of the story; here she stops, as if she despaired of 
giving any just conception of what she would fain 
have every one experience for himself; and she can 
only add, out of the confidence of her own couvic- 
tion, and in the transport of a joyful discovery, "Is 
not this the Christ? " 



THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 285 

What, then, was the power which had constrained 
the will and entranced the heart of this woman? Can 
you believe it was the humau power of that self-con- 
sciousness which Jesus had armed against her by his 
revelation of the great facts of her life ? He told her 
wh;it she was, but others could have told her that. 
He sent a scorching flash of shame through the his- 
tory of her life ; but she had lived that history, and 
could she be confounded by a stranger's acquaintance 
with it ? No, it was not that. Shamed she may have 
been, but shame does not convince us; pained she 
may have been, but she had a joy also which tri- 
umphed over pain, and seized on it as martyrs clutch 
the stake or the firebrand. Plainly the hand which 
had bruised her, had healed her also. Jesus' words 
had fallen like coals upon her heart ; but they would 
only have seared ; but Jesus' spirit had followed his 
words, quenching the coals and curing the smart. 
In the harder and sharper revelation of her sins, 
there was a revelation of love and power tenfold 
more lustrous and constraining; it was that spirit 
which won the hearts of heavy-laden sinners, and 
dried the tears of suffering men and women, and 
lifted publicans, in repentant humility, where Phari- 
saic pride was helpless to climb. With her eyes 
the woman saw only Jesus, but with her heart she 
felt the Christ, she felt the Lord of love in the man 
of sorrows, and the Master of life in the victim of 
the cross, and in that great heart, which throbbed 
with pity for sinners, she could see that fathomless 
well of which Jesus spoke, whose waters spring up 
12* 



286 THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 

into everlasting life. And she goes home exel aim- 
ing, "Come, and see," as if she would say, "It is 
impossible for me to tell you the half of what I have 
learned. ? He told me all that ever I did,' but that is 
only one thing, that is the least of all ; you must see 
for yourselves ; no one can explain it to you. Come, 
come and see ! " 

She had gone to the well filled with her Samaritan 
prejudices, but that divine presence had scattered 
them, how, she could not have told herself, not by 
the force of reasoning, not by the terrors of rebuke, 
not as the whirlwind tears up and scatters, not as the 
thunderbolt cleaves through and crushes, but as the 
sweet radiance of the sun melts its way into every 
cleft and seam of the water-soaked and frost-shod- 
den earth, and draws out of it and dissipates in the air 
the cold moisture which oppresses it. She had gone 
to the well, thinking that only "in this place," on 
the top of Gerizim, " men ought to worship," but she 
came back feeling that she, at least, could worship 
anywhere with that Lord of worship and great Mas- 
ter of assemblies. It was not what Jesus said, it 
was the divine mystery of his spirit, love deeper than 
Jacob's well, majesty higher than Mount Grerizim, 
and a power that could cement Samaria and Jeru- 
salem, weld heart to heart, wreathe hand with hand, 
till the world had but one worship, and owned but 
one prophet and Saviour. 

And now I proceed to inquire if this wonderful 
spirit of Jesus does not animate the gospel to-day, 
if this same power does not, in fact, make the gos- 



THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 287 

pel for us, what Jesus' language was to the woman, 
a searcher of hearts, and if it is not to the still living 
Jesus that the words of Jesus owe their incomparable 
charm, and their world-compelling attraction. In 
some less degree, but in a degree sensible even to the 
coldest heart, we feel the presence of Jesus in the 
teachings he has given us. The gospel is like that 
curtain which hung before the Holy of Holies, and 
the words of Jesus embroider and emblazon it. We 
are in the tabernacle, and we feel as the Jews felt 
on the great day of atonement. We can see that 
curtain before us, we command all one side of it, but 
we know there is another side, and on that side is 
hidden the grandeur, and there are the secrets of the 
power of our religion. There stands our High-Priest, 
before the ark of the covenant ; we cannot see him, 
we do not hear him, but at moments of rapt atten- 
tion, in the deep silences of our hearts, and with the 
sharpened eye of our faith, we can see the tremblings 
of the curtain, we can catch the ripples of motion as 
they break and rustle against it, and we have no 
doubt there is life there ; there is a power there, both 
human and divine, and behind that curtain the hands 
of a man are laid on the wings of mighty cherubim, 
and the head of the priest is crowned with the glory 
of the Shekinah. This is the mystery which lies 
behind and within the gospel, and when we stand 
consciously before it, when through the great curtain of 
the gospel we once hear the murmur and feel the power 
of the great presence which it enfolds, we bow as 
Nathaniel did, exclaiming, with ardor of conviction, 



288 THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 

"Thou art the Son of God, thou art the King of 
Israel ! " 

I apprehend it was of the gospel Paul was mainly 
thinking, when he said of God's word, that it is alive, 
and sharper than any two-edged sword, and is a dis- 
cerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart " ; 
and for no sinful man, who has ever brought his heart 
into that presence, would it be necessary to prove 
that the gospel has a living energy, a startling close- 
ness of aim, a piercing keenness, a stereoscopic, re- 
volving splendor of revelation, from which the sinner 
withdraws with a heartfelt confession like that of the 
woman, " He told me all that ever I did." 

I remember hearing a prisoner say once that he 
never fully conceived his guilt till he was brought 
into court, and then it seemed to his stricken con- 
sciousness that every look went through and through 
him, and that the judge's eye was kindling a match 
among the dark secrets of his soul. But this was 
fear shuddering before justice. The power of God's 
truth is more than this. It is the power of justice, 
with the power of the gospel added, condemning 
power and saving power. 

You know by how little the black coal differs 
chemically from the brilliant diamond ; by how little 
in mere statement, by how much to the possibilities 
of science. There is just this difference between the 
words of Jesus and any other words whatever ; there 
is just this difference between a Christless religion 
and the religion of Jesus. You can begin, as you 
think, to turn a sinful soul into a spiritual diamond, 



THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 289 

and you fancy you sometimes come very near to suc- 
cess ; but you have only hardened it and carbonized 
it, without making it one whit cleaner or more trans- 
parent. But put it into the hands of the Master, let 
his love melt it and his grace shape it, and all its 
blackness is gone, and in every face and at every 
turn it gives back to your eye the image of the 
power which has transformed it. 

And here is the secret of an earnest faith in the 
gospel, that it takes hold on the living spirit of 
Jesus. It is not like faith in human science or wis- 
dom. That only finds a point of attachment. It is 
like a short, single reach of telegraph wire, strung 
only from one pole to another ; the wind may make 
music with it, and the birds may sit upon it and sing 
there, but it never thrills with a stream of electric 
fire or throbs with a message of joy. But faith in 
Christ is a circuit of divine life and power. Words 
are only the keys, doctrines are but the symbols and 
signs ; but by these and through these, there speaks 
to us the undying spirit of Jesus himself, and while 
our hearts are probed, and our weakness and guilt 
come out of the depths where we tried to bury them 
and forget them, we are compelled to repeat the 
admiring cry of the multitudes, "Never man spake 
like this man," and to ask, even out of the excess of 
our conviction, " Is not this the Christ?" 

When Jesus spoke to the woman of Samaria he 
was in his mid-career, and how little she knew of 
that life and those sufferings, through which the spirit 
of Jesus was to ascend its throne of power and 
glory ! 



290 THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 

We see with what joyful promptness she acknowl- 
edged the commanding spirit of Jesus : what, think 
you, would have been her feeling and her faith, if 
she had looked on Jesus in the shadow of Calvary, 
if she had stood with the Marys, surveying through 
their tears that rugged pass of pangs through which 
the human in Jesus was lifted into the godlike $ and 
the love of Jesus was baptized with atoning blood ? 

There is one thing here to which I desire to ask 
your attention. You know what efforts are now 
being made to show that our Master, in many of 
his richest discourses, his weightiest inculcations, his 
most beautiful words, was himself but a disciple ; 
that he was silently borrowing from that mass of 
wisdom which was afterwards reposited, almost at 
haphazard, in the Talmud. I do not believe this. I 
believe any candid consideration of the facts refutes 
this extreme opinion. But what if it were true, yea, 
what if it were ten times true ? What can the most 
radical interpretation of the Talmud do for the New 
Testament, which the New Testament has not done for 
the Old ? And do we reject the Old Testament because 
so much of it reappears in the New? The Talmud is 
but an exposition of the law ; it professes to be only 
this. And Jesus has repealed the law; and do you 
think he went to the lawyers to learn this lesson of 
repeal, and imbibe from them the ideas which have 
exploded their whole system and buried it under the 
rubbish of eighteen centuries ? I trow not. 

It is the gospel which has kept the Old Testament 
itself alive to the present hour. They are christian 



THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 21)1 

ligaments, tendons and nerves of christian doctrine, 
that string together and hold up to-day that antique 
skeleton of the old dispensation. And I could concede 
all that infidels claim in this matter, I could admit 
that our Master had learned of the doctors of the 
Talmud, and I should still be lost in admiration of 
that marvellous power which breathed life into these 
dry bones, and clothed with flushes of animated 
beauty and set quivering with pulses of irrepressible 
vigor that defunct old Talmudic body. 

I am reminded that there is shown in some French 
museum, I believe in the Louvre, a bullet which 
struck Napoleon and slightly wounded him. They 
say to you, when they show it, "This bullet hit the 
Emperor, and he took it up in his own hand, and 
put it in his pocket." It looks like any old-fashioned 
musket-ball, but you can look at it till you fancy you 
almost see the face of Napoleon reflected in it ; yet 
3 7 ou can but say, " This is only a rusty piece of 
moulded lead, and it would never have been heard 
of but for the fact that it wounded an emperor." 

Now I do not doubt the time will come when men 
will take up the Talmud, that rusty, well-oxidized 
piece of antiquity, and they will show it and say, 
" See, this is the bullet which was once shot at our 
Master, and they say that he had picked it up formerly, 
and shot it at the Pharisees." Men may believe this 
if they please, but they will say, " This antiquated 
relic would never have been heard of but for Jesus.'' 
And that is the truth. The beauty of the Talmud 
plays over the accepted religion of the old time like 
the iris hues of sunset gilding the panes of a Gothic 



292 THE WOMAN OF SAMARIA. 

window ; but the power of Jesus cuts into it and 
flashes through it like lightning, and in these Mosaic 

© © © ' 

ruins, which are built up into the religion of the cross, 
it is no longer the form,- mere words and husks of 
teaching, which we wonder at, but the spirit which 
breathes through them, and that is the spirit of the 
undying Jesus. 

Lord Bacon proposed, as one of the severest tests 
of scientific truth, what he called the experiment of 
the cross. We have also our test of the cross, our 
crucial experiment, and it is, literally, for religion, 
what Bacon's was, but by metaphor, for science. Our 
religion sets up the cross before us, the sacrifice of 
One who gave himself to death for us. If our faith 
owns not the cross, it does not hold the spirit of 
Jesus, for it is from the cross, and through its black 
shadows, that spirit breaks and shines upon us like a 
gleam of mercy from on high. Reject the cross, and 
you still carry the sins which Jesus' word has touched 
into tenfold enormity ; but own the cross, and own 
the redeeming blood which falls from it, and the sins 
you feel are washed away by mercy, and you become 
new creatures in Christ Jesus. 

We take up and repeat the words of the woman of 
Samaria. We give her invitation, my friends, to 
you. w Come and see ! " Come to the living spirit 
of Jesus in the gospel. Shrink not from its revela- 
tions. Let conscience respond to the searching scru- 
tiny of the truth ; and we feel sure that you also will 
take up the question, not as an inquiry, but as a 
joyous assurance of irrefutable persuasion and tri- 
umphant appeal, — "Is not this the Christ?" 



LOOKING ON CHRIST AT THE JUDGMENT. 



" Behold, he cometh icith clouds ; and every eye shall see him, and 
they also which pierced him; and all kindreds of the earth shall 
wail because of him." — Revelation i, 7. 

We have here a picture in prophetic colors of that 
coming day which our mother speech has named, 
with one of its shoit, marrowful words, the day of 
doom. The picture is only outlined, hut it is drawn 
with those quick, bold, strong strokes, which always 
proclaim the hand of a master, and the master's hand 
here is that of the spirit of Jesus himself. This is 
the characteristic of every attempt which the Bible 
makes to place before us its conception of the great 
day of judgment ; that it seizes on a few salient fea- 
tures, and leaves us to infer the rest from them. It 
does not try to utter what is unutterable ; it does 
not try to crowd, on the narrow canvas of human 
speech, scenes and colors which demand the walls 
of the universe for their adequate display. Hence 
every effort to paint the last judgment is a theologi- 
cal failure. Even the grandest of all these attempts, 
that of Michael Angelo, which lends its dusky splen- 
dors of art to the walls of the Sistine Chapel, fails 
to add anything at all to the simple majesty of those 



294 LOOKING ON CHRIST AT THE JUDGMENT. 

forms of light and masses of shadow, which come 
out to every mind in the brief hints of Revelation. 

Notice by what transition of thought John intro- 
duces this great theme of his prophecies ; yon find 
something abrupt in the change of subject : " Unto 
him that hath loved us, and washed our sins in his 
own blood, and hath made as kings and priests unto 
God and his Father ; to him be glory and dominion 
forever." He seems to remember here that this trib- 
ute of the disciples to the love of Jesus is to be also 
the great Te Deum of the saints in heaven. This is 
the doxology of the redeemed. These strains will 
burst from ascending millions on the morning of the 
resurrection, hallowed dust will animate itself to this 
song of praise, the graves of them that sleep in Jesus 
will stir and open at this music, and when the arch- 
angel's trump shall have ceased to be heard, the 
heavens will continue to ring with this Gloria in Ex- 
celsis, " Glory to him that hath loved us, and hath 
washed our sins in his own blood !'' 

But now John seems to pause as if under some 
revulsion of feeling. He pauses, just as we do when- 
ever we let our souls mount up on the eagle-wing of 
such transporting anticipation, and then let them, as 
we must let them, fall down and back to the sympa- 
thies of earth. For our christian joy is now like a 
bird confined with a cord ; however high it may soar, 
it must drag after it the silken bond that restrains 
it. Our bonds are the thought and the love of those 
who are without Christ. We understand how John 
felt when he set joy and wailing here in so sharp an 



LOOKING ON CHRIST AT THE JUDGMENT. 295 

antithesis. For let the saint's doxology be as loud 
as the cymbals of heaven, let it girdle the earth 
and belt the skies with song, what shall we say of 
those other sounds which must blend with the ter- 
rors of that hour " when all the dead, small and 
great, shall stand before God " ? 

If there be few that are saved, what refrain can be 
found for the myriads of voices that must proclaim, in 
that appalling moment, the anguish of the lost soul, 
when over the crash of dissolving worlds, above the 
tumult of mustering nations and kingdoms, will resound 
that cry of despair with which men shall call on the 
rocks and mountains to fall on them, and to hide them 
from the wrath of the Lamb ? And as we think, with 
joy, in what goodly company we may take our flight 
to the heavenly world, going up side by side with the 
beloved of our own households and the honored of our 
own brethren, feeling as the dying Calvin felt when 
he said, " What brightness shines in my soul at the 
thought that in a few hours I shall go to join the 
society of the wisest and best that ever lived ; and 
most delightful of all, I shall go to sit down at the 
feet of Jesus," — as we think and feel this, does there 
not come a sudden pang that dashes our joy, when 
we change assurance into questioning, and ask our 
hearts to give us, ask God to give us, some hope that 
this and that dear friend, this and that child, or fa- 
ther, or brother, or sister, shall not be left out from 
the great chorus of rejoicing spirits ? if we could feel 
gi-ief in heaven as keenly as we feel it here, how 
should we sing one song after the divisions and sepa- 



296 LOOKING ON CHRIST AT THE JUDGMENT. 

rations on the last clay? How we should balance our 
rapture with agony ! " This one is here ! " we should 
cry. " This one stands with me on the right hand of 
the throne. Jesus has saved for me so much of my 
love ; so much of my earthly happiness is blooming 
here, but where is the rest ? There is a void in my 
heart, that dear friend is lost to me, that brother 
has made shipwreck, that companion of my years has 
gone down to eternal night ! " 

Oh, if these anxieties, these longings, these sor- 
rows over unconverted men were carried into 
heaven, every pleasure would be draped with a 
pall and every song would be drowned in tears ! 

These are the thoughts which came hard upon the 
exulting flight of John's spirit, and flung their deep 
shade upon the glimpses of the text: "For behold, 
He cometh with clouds, and every eye shall see him, 
and they also who pierced him ; and all kindreds .of 
the earth shall wail because of him." 

This passage at once connects itself with a simi- 
lar text in Zechariah, — " They shall look upon Him 
whom they have pierced." 

He who was pierced is Jesus, it can be no other. 
We must be satisfied of this. But who are they that 
are here spoken of as having pierced him? What is 
the meaning of the words " piercing Jesus " ? It is 
evident that John does not intend here that act which 
concluded the indignities and tortures inflicted on the 
body of Jesus at his crucifixion ; for that was the act 
of but one man in the multitude of Jesus' execution- 
ers. "And a soldier took a spear and pierced his 



LOOKING ON CHRIST AT THE JUDGMENT. 297 

side." They did not pierce him, but he did. And 
this act of the soldier only suggested a term to ex- 
press an idea similar to that which the word " crucify " 
itself is used to convey, when the apostle speaks in 
Hebrews of those who "have crucified the Lord 
afresh." 

Some one may say that those who stood around 
the Roman soldier, as he plunged his spear into the 
side of Jesus, were as guilty as he, because they 
abetted the deed. That is true, but that is the very 
argument which puts the sinner of to-day under the 
same condemnation. Around the dying Saviour 
were gathered two groups, as clearly and distinctly 
defined and separated, as sunrise from midnight. 
There were the Johns and the Marys, bowed to the 
earth with unspeakable sorrow, and yearning with 
love and desire, if only to touch those bleeding feet 
or kiss that pallid and blood-stained brow. Jesus 
was dying for them,, but they felt only that he was 
dying from them, and every word he spoke, every 
groan of pain, every look of tenderness they an- 
swered with their tears and echoed with their hearts. 
And there was that other group, far more numerous, 
whose eyes were tearless, whose hearts were ribbed 
with the cold iron of indifference, and whose tongues 
moved only in raillery and scoffing. Where would 
you have stood, impenitent sinner, if you had been 
there ? We know what you would say. There is in 
you a conflict of sentiment with motive. Sentiment 
cries out in your heart, "I would have put myself 
with the disciples, I would have knelt with the weep- 



298 LOOKING ON CHRIST AT THE JUDGMENT. 

ing Johns and Marys." But sentiment is only sun- 
light on the waters ; it gilds them, but it does not 
raise a single wave of motion. You think you 
never would have stood in the group of Pharisees 
and soldiers. But in which group are you found 
to-day? The cross of Jesus is lifted before you, at 
the foot of that cross are gathered hearts as loving as 
those of the first disciples, there fall tears, as sweet 
to Jesus, as those which anointed his feet on earth ; 
there lifts itself a faith as devoted and childlike as 
that whiten shone in the eyes of the twelve. Are 
you in that group? Do your tears start at the story 
of Jesus' sufferings for you? Is your love strong 
enough to make you cry, — 

" Ashamed of Jesus, that dear friend, 
On whom my hopes of heaven depend? " 

If you are not in that group, then you have classi- 
fied yourself, you have taken your place where Jesus 
himself sorrows to see you, and that sorrow is the 
wound of your spear. You are among those who 
pierce the Saviour. He calls on you to confess him 
before men, but you stand silent among the Phari- 
sees. If you owned him, you would pass from that 
group to the other, you would feel the love which 
looks down on you from the cross, and } t ou would 
say, "Jesus died for the world, and half the world 
is against him. I will not stand with that Christ-dis- 
owning half, I will bow my head where that atoning 
blood may fall on me. It shall never be said of me 
that I blocked up the channels by which Jesus' love 



LOOKING ON CHRIST AT THE JUDGMENT. 299 

reaches the souls of the guilty, that my heart felt all 
the mightiness of this love, and mv tongue refused 
to acknowledge, it and my acts failed to show it." 

But we come now to the pith and core of the truth 
so solemnly announced in the text: "Every eye shall 
see him, and they also who pierced him." 

This is the promise of wonderful sweetness to every 
disciple. He sees Jesus now by faith. He hears his 
voice in the chambers of darkness and trouble. He 
feels his hand on the pillow of his sickness and suf- 
fering. He reaches out to him in the storms and 
eclipses of life and lays hold on hope with the 
assurance, "I am with you, let not your heart be 
troubled." But this is only a dream compared with 
the beautiful reality of that vision which is to bring 
Jesus face to face with the disciple. The tears will 
be all on our side then, but the joy will be divided 
between us and cur Master. "There," w r e can say, 
"is the head that wore the crown of thorns for us. 
There are the feet that walked among the olives, and 
the hands that were clasped in prayer and agony for 
us. There is the face that was buffeted for us, and 
there are the eyes that shone with love or were 
dimmed with tears for us. That head is lifted to 
welcome us. That face beams with affection. Those 
hands are extended to embrace us. Those feet come 
down from the throne to meet us on our way." Oh, 
wdiat a day that will be to crown the toils and strug- 
gles of this life ! Oh, what a meeting that must be 
when John comes up from his bloody grave, saying, 
" Master, I once leaned my head on thy breast, I am 



300 LOOKING ON CHRIST AT THE JUDGMENT. 

come to lean it there forever " ; when Peter comes up 
saying, " Master, thou knowest that I love thee. I 
have sealed it on the cross by which I died. I am 
come to sing it to the angels forever " ; when all the 
martyrs come up, saying, " Master thou didst die to 
bring thy love to us, we have died to bring our love 
up to thee ! " 

After these, after all the host of the sanctified, if 
heaven can keep any place for you, my brother, and 
for me, any vacancy in those illustrious ranks for us 
to fill, what joy it is to know that Jesus will not 
overlook us ! "These also," he will say, " have been 
faithful in a few things ; they, too, shall sit down 
with me in my kingdom." 

We have felt the buoyancy of this prospect under 
our troubles ; we have looked out of our sorrows to 
the starry hope of this day ; we have so dissolved 
care and pain, in the longing to see Jesus, that we 
have felt able to walk over burning coals to reach 
this blessed end, and we could sing, with a special 
accent on every syllable, 

" Life with trials hard may press me, 
'Twill but drive me to thy breast." 

I have seen a sailor, after years of sickness in 
foreign lands, and perils by tempest on the sea, land- 
ing on the piers of New York and rushing with a 
child s tumult of eagerness and ecsta y into the arms 
that were waiting there to fold him. What had the 
sound of the billows done for him, but to make more 
dear the voices of love ? What had his lonely vigils 



LOOKING ON CHRIST AT THE JUDGMENT. 301 

and his unwatehed hammock done, but to give new 
brightness and beauty to the faces that smiled on him 
from the shore ? Christian, " tossed upon life's stormy 
billows," the turmoil will soon cease to sound, the 
vigils will soon be passed ; and when we hear the dear 
voices that shall greet us on the shore, and see the 
face in which is reflected all the love we have ever 
known or felt on earth or in heaven, every sigh will 
be turned into a gush of joy and " God shall wipe 
away all tears from our eyes." 

And now, if these words are so full of promise to 
the faithful disciple, what are they to those who have 
no hope in Christ? What will looking upon Jesus 
be to those who have denied him ? " Every eye 
shall see him, and they also who pierced him." 
There will be no escape for any one. The sinner may 
hide himself here from that vision of Jesus which 
embodies his love to the faith of the disciples. He 
may entrench himself within his excuses and his 
reservations; but death will sweep all these away, 
and at the last he must stand face to face with the 
love he has rejected, and look upon the Saviour he 
has slighted. 

I do not wish to speak of the terrible compression 
of meaning there is in the words, "look upon him 
they have pierced." I do not wish to uncover the 
thought which lies in the phrase, "The wrath of the 
Lamb." There is no just anger like the anger of 
love. If you had a loving father, when you w T ere a 
child, you couid bear his severest strokes better than 
you could the grief and pain you had written on his 

13 



302 LOOKING ON CHRIST AT THE JUDGMENT. 

face. I have heard a child exclaim, "Punish me, 
father, but do not look at me so ! " And what is it 
we all feel more acutely than anything else in our 
remembrance of the fathers and mothers that have 
gone from us? Not the chastisement we have suf- 
fered, but the silent sorrow we have set upon the 
brow and stamped on the quivering lip. 

A young man who had been convicted of crime 
was found one day weeping bitterly in his cell. 
"Don't think," said he, "that I am not man enough 
to bear up under my disgrace. I am, but I am too 
much of a man to keep back my tears when I re- 
member my mother. When you arrested me, I 
looked up at the window, and there was the pale 
face of my mother pressed against the glass. I can- 
not forget that look. It haunts me in my sleep." 
And what is it that so often plants a sting in the very 
heart of the tender memories which the father or 
mother cherishes of a beloved and departed child? 
It is that look, as persistent as an accusing' con- 
science, which betrayed on the innocent and tear- 
stained little face the sense of unmerited rebuke and 
punishment. 

You must have read that touching confession of 
Louis Gaylord Clark, in which he tells us how he 
punished his little boy one night for going into the 
water, not knowing that the child had saved one of 
his companions by doing so. And at midnight he 
was called up to witness the dying struggles of 
the child he loved so well, and as he stooped over 
the little body, vainly trying to call up to the face 



LOOKING ON CHRIST AT THE JUDGMENT. 303 

one glance of recognition, he cried in his anguish, 
" My punishment is greater than I can bear ! " and 
years afterwards he exclaimed, " I would give any- 
thing, anything, to banish from my sight that 
patient, pleading, wronged, and suffering look of 
my brave little boy." Yet these things which we 
remember so well, what are they in comparison with 
that remembrance which the unforgiven sinner must 
carry into eternity with him? They are but the 
smoking torches which we hold up to the high roof 
of a cavern whose mysteries w T e are exploring. 
These things are but the dark spots which we see 
on the surface of our past life, but to the sinner, 
all life must hereafter seem but one blotch of folly, 
and one long blur of guilt. He does not see this 
now, because he is on a level with his life, and lines 
look like mere dots, and magnitudes are foreshort- 
ened. Wait till his life shall rise up before him, like 
a statue lifted on its pedestal, and how its real fea- 
tures will start out, and the truth and meauing of its 
aspect flash upou his eye in the blaze of those eternal 
lamps which conscieuce will hang up in the great 
hall of judgment. 

He does not see Christ now, because he holds him 
at the distance of blindness. There is a blind point 
in the eye, where the rays of light produce no sensa- 
tion, and give no picture whatever. Make two 
marks on a sheet of paper, two inches from each 
other, and then close one eye, and bring the paper up 
gradually to the other, and you will soon discover 
that your eye fails, at a certain point, to detect but 



304 LOOKING ON CHRIST AT THE JUDGMENT. 

one of the marks ; it is impossible to discern the 
other. There is a blind point in the sinner's soul. 
The world and Christ are equally before it, but it fails 
to see Jesus, because it has put him in the focus of 
its blind spot. But there will be no blindness at the 
last day; " every eye shall see him." And I ask you 
to consider now, what this lookiug upon Jesus will 
be, what it must mean for the sinner. 

It seems to me that the most pungent significance 
of the fact lies in the thought that it will be the look- 
ing upon the object of our ingratitude. No man, 
whose heart is not all crust, can look without emo- 
tion upon the face of a friend whom he has deeply 
wronged. Passion may stifle love, while we smite 
those who have wooed us with kindness ; but when 
the passion has cooled, and we look upon the face we 
have seamed with the furrows of grief, how we 
avenge the wrong we have done by laying the stripes 
upon our own hearts ! Not long ago a man of repu- 
table standing, but of violent and uncontrollable tem- 
per, fiercely struck his wife, and then rushed from 
the house. The wife was carried speechless to the 
hospital. When she became able to talk, her sole 
anxiety was to shield her husband, and she refused to 
tell who had struck her. 

The officers determined to bring the husband face 
to face with her. They went for him, and told him 
their design. " Oh," said he, " not now, not now ; any- 
thing but that ! I will confess it all. I did the deed, 
but how can I look upon my poor wife's face again ? '' 
Do you not think Peter had this feeling when he 



LOOKING ON CHRIST AT THE JUDGMENT. 305 

stood warming himself at the brazier of coals, and 
denying the Master who was just ready to die for 
him? There was no warmth in those coals. Peter 
rubbed his hands in the excitement of that criminal 
hour, and stole furtive glances at the door through 
which he could just see his suffering Master. But 
what is that which suddenly convulses the face of this 
bold abjurer? What arrests his nervous movements 
over the fire, brings those scalding tears into his eyes, 
and makes him break, with the energy of despair, 
through the throng in the hall, and rush out into the 
darkness? He has caught the eye of Jesus. He has 
just looked upon the face of his disowned Master. 
That is all ; but what infinitude of power there is in 
this ! 

A German infidel was visited one day in a painful 
sickness by an intimate friend who shared his own 
belief. Said he to his friend, " I have had a most 
wonderful dream : I saw Christ. I have, you know, 
often seen .those matchless heads of Jesus drawn by 
Guido ; but art never conceived such a face as I have 
seen in my dream. What grief was in it, what love 
was in it, what inexpressible pity was in it ! How it 
accused me, how it melted me ! " And then raising 
himself on his pillow, he added, with vehemence, 
" O my friend, I have made up my mind. I cannot, 
I will not, take the risk of going into eternity to look 
upon such a face as that ! " 

That dream, my friends, will be the reality for 
every unconverted man. That face of Jesus, with 
sorrow enough in it almost to quench the glory 



306 LOOKING ON CEIRIST AT THE JUDGMENT. 

around his head, with the painful slight of love whose 
eloquence needs no tongue and admits no answer, 
that face of Jesus the sinner must look upon, and read 
there the whole story of his life and the uncancelled 
guilt of his ingratitude. And if tears are shed in 
heaven, I could believe that when Jesus sees before 
him a lost soul, he must renew, from the very an- 
guish of baffled love, the tears he shed over the blind 
and misguided people of Jerusalem. The soldier who 
pierced Jesus will look upon him, and I can con- 
ceive that, out of the overwhelming astonishment of 
that hour, he may cast himself down at the feet of 
Jesus, and exclaim, " O Jesus, I did it in my igno- 
rance ! I helped nail those hands, I drove the spike 
through those feet, I joined in the sneer and the jibe 
at that bleeding brow, I thrust the lance into thy 
side ; but I knew not who thou wast. I was a poor 
hireling, only fit to do the bidding of my masters. O 
Jesus, I remember thy prayer; I remember thou 
saidst, ? They know not what they do.' Bring me 
uucler the blessing of that prayer, and let that blood 
I shed wash away my grievous sin ! " 

But what can the sinner of our day find to excuse 
himself when he looks upon Him he has pierced? 
Must he not own, with the tenseness and keenness of 
remorse, "I knew what I was doing; conscience told 
me, God's word urged me, friends warned me, my 
own heart prompted me. There is the love which 
entreated me ; those are the hands which were 
stretched out to save me ; those are the feet that 
stood waiting at my door ; that is the Saviour who 



LOOKING ON CHRIST AT THE JUDGMENT. 307 

called me a°:ain and airain. I know it now, I knew 
it then. There is no excuse for me, no plea I can 
make." 

And if it were needful, heaven might break its 
solemn silence and answer this mournful confession 
with the old peal of rebuke which shook the proud 
hearts of God's people : " I have called and ye have 
refused ; I have stretched out my hand and no man 
regarded. Ye have set at naught my counsel and 
would none of my reproof. I also will laugh at your 
calamity. I will mock when your fear cometh." Oh, 
by the awful agitations of that coming day, I entreat 
you, impenitent sinner and cold-hearted professor, to 
lay to your hearts the momentous question, are you 
ready to look upon Jesus ? Can you stand before 
him your sins have pierced, with the joy of knowing 
that your sins have been washed away by his blood? 
While others, your friends, your wives, your hus- 
bands, your fathers and mothers, are kneeling down 
with the Johns and the Marys, will you, must you, 
with shame and confusion, bury your faces in the 
crowd of the Pharisees? O my friends, think of 
that morning which must break upon our slumbers 
and awaken us from the dreams of the grave ! Think 
of that hour which will call us to judgment, and of 
that Judge before whom we must stand ! " For 
behold, He cometh, and every eye shall see him, and 
they also who pierced him." 



WHERE ARE WE? 

Is our Keligion the Christian Religion, as Christ taught 
and his Apostles preached it ? 



" Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some 
shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and 
doctrines of devils." — 1 Tim. iv, 1. 

We are not able to give an intelligent answer to 
the question, " Where are we?" without passing un- 
der careful review the notion we entertain of that 
body of doctrine and practice which we take to be 
substantially the christian religion, without asking 
ourselves whether that notion does or does not faith- 
fully represent the gospel as revealed by Jesus and 
established by the apostles. We shall all agree that 
the marks of time have made themselves visible here 
as elsewhere ; that again and again the imperfections 
of men, not to say their folly and wickedness, have 
fearfully changed the original simplicity, and marred 
the native beauty of the truth as taught by Christ. 
We are all familiar with the great protest which the 
purer heart of the church has delivered against the 
corruptions accomplished or attempted in the past ; 
and we know that the great reformations which have 
resulted have been merely the honest struggles of the 
better part of the church to revive the original spirit 



WHERE ARE WE? 309 

and to bring back the apostolic model of teaching and 
of practice. 

But we know also that all the reformations the 
church has had, all the efforts which have been made 
through many centuries, have been but partial in 
their scope, narrow in their aim, and but limited in 
their results. That is generally the character, and 
that the issue of the best-intentioned and most sincere 
labors at reform. There seems to be a sort of law 
that every good work should deduct a percentage as 
toll or excise to the powers of darkness ; that every 
fresh importation of truth, every new cargo or in- 
voice of novel ideas, should be charged custom dues, 
and these dues be subtracted from the full value of 
the entered stock. We cannot, it would seem, get a 
lodgment for a new truth without a special bargain 
that does more or less injustice to the truth itself. 
When we offer to our age a doctrine which we be- 
lieve is the very thing it needs to set it right, and 
redeem it from its wrongs, we have to make conces- 
sions that rob our doctrine of half its efficacy. We 
have to use the innocent craft of the physician and 
gild our pill, although we know the gilding is not 
only worthless, but it may absorb, neutralize, and 
counteract the qualities of the medicine. The most 
earnest reformers stand cooling themselves in the 
lobby of wisdom, before they can get the ear of in- 
fluence and command, and they find that even intelli- 
gence and prudence have to be flattered and coaxed 
before they will consent to favor the most salutary 
counsels or give heed to the most heavenly mes- 
13* 



310 WHERE ARE WE? 

sages. There is a process through which every doc- 
trine must pass on its way to the popular mind, 
a mill in which it has to be ground, sifted, bolted, 
ere the times will undertake to digest it. And the 
great mischief is that in this mill truth is sure to lose, 
like the finest flour, some of her most essential and 
most nutritive elements, which the miller calls "bran " 
or " shorts," and throws aside for inferior uses. And 
what between tolling and bolting, between the infirm- 
ities of the reformer and the infirmities of the age, 
between the deductions he is tempted to make, that 
his reform may seem pleasant and agreeable, and the 
subtractions he is bribed or compelled to make, that 
he may get men to adopt it, there is hardly ever a re- 
form that accomplishes its object fully, hardly ever a 
doctrine that hits the mark of popular favor and ac- 
ceptance without a preliminary miss, hardly ever an 
earnest advocate of right that does not again and 
again lose faith in mankind, and almost conclude that 
everything, even the salvation of human souls, suc- 
ceeds best when it is made a matter of bargain. 

But I leave all such excursive thoughts, and come 
directly to the matter in hand. We know, then, how 
terribly the religion of Christ came to be corrupted 
very soon after its primal establishment ; and we 
know also that all the efforts at reformation which 
were made through many centuries, and by many 
men in many places, were very partial in character 
and in result. Naturally, then, every thinking man 
will ask this question, How does our religion com- 
pare with the primitive model? Have we among us, 



WHERE ARE WE? 311 

in this nineteenth century, the Christianity of the first 
age ? Have we got rid of all the corruptions which crept 
into the church, and used to excite, age after age, the 
godly indignation of the Waldos, Husses, Jeromes, 
Wicklyffes, Luthers of the world ? And if such great 
reformers really failed to make a clean sweep of the 
corruptions which then lay, like the dirt and refuse 
of generations, in the corners and over the aisles of 
the sanctuary, are we sure that any subsequent re- 
former, any later sexton or sacristan, has used his 
broom upon these unsightly and nauseous heaps, and 
swept them out of the church? I repeat, any 
thoughtful man must ask himself the general question 
which resolves itself into such queries as these, — and 
it is a very serious and even solemn question for us 
to ask, — Do we hold to-day, in the religion which we 
profess, the veritable christian religion which the 
Master taught, and which his disciples proclaimed to 
the world ? We cannot evade this question by plead- 
ing the necessity which has compelled us, as chris- 
tians, to alter many things in practice and to give 
way to the progress of civilization. I do not dispute 
this necessity. 

I do not deny the force of the argument which 
shows that we could not keep up old observances in 
this new time ; that many things enjoined then, and 
which were quite consistent with current usage, such 
as "washing feet," "the holy kiss," etc., and which 
have grown wholly obsolete, could not be practised 
now without calling down ridicule upon the church. I 
only observe the fact that such changes have taken 



312 WHERE ARE WE? 

place, and without speaking of the question of their 
propriety, I call your attention to them as evidences 
which may help us toward answering the main ques- 
tion, how far our religion is the veritable christian 
religion preached by the Lord Jesus. 

There are those who stoutly deny that there is in 
the gospel a principle of evolution, a law by which 
it adapts itself to new circumstances, and' unfolds 
new energies, new resources, new materials, to meet 
always the new demands of the growing time. I 
believe in such a law, and hence I am not disturbed 
at all by the changes which* we are discussing. But 
how can those who deny this law, and who contend 
that all things should forever remain just as they 
were established by the Great Founder and by his 
commissioners, how can they pacify their consciences 
to-day, when they look around and see the manifest 
evidences that point to the fact and the character of 
the great changes which have passed over the religion 
of the gospel? In the gospel, we all know, the life 
is everywhere held to be above the body ; spirit is 
the main thing, and form is only secondary. Yet it 
is interesting to look at the form also, and see how 
unlike the christian church to-clay actually is to 
that ideal which the Master had in his mind, and to 
that simple embodiment which the apostles gave 
to the brotherly spirit and the missionary zeal of 
the early christians. I sometimes think, in the mus- 
ings of my leisure hours, what would be the specula- 
tions of the apostle Paul if he could visit New York 
on some Sunday morning. Of course you know the 



WHERE ARE WE ? 313 

christians of his day had do special houses of wor- 
ship. The very thought of such an edifice as we now 
call a "church" — as if the house, indeed, were the 
fundamental idea in the conception of the church, 
just reversing the apostolical conception — was un- 
known to them. 

In Palestine they could sometimes get the use of 
a synagogue, but it was not till long after, that they 
began to use those buildings which were devoted 
to the business of the law, and were called " basil- 
icas " ; hence that name was often given to churches ; 
but for a long time the early christians could meet 
only in private houses, or in out-of-the-way fields, 
woods, vineyards, etc. So that Paul, of course, had 
never seen a church, had never dreamed of such a 
structure, and if he were suddenly set down before 
Trinity Church, would be as utterly at a loss to guess 
the character and purpose of that building as he 
would be to divine, at the first sight, the use of a 
printing-press. 

I may go further. The Master himself held in his 
mind and teaching, only that conception of the church 
which he has so beautifully illustrated in those 
passages which enforce and command the idea of a 
christian brotherhood, a close, warm, faithful, lov- 
ing companionship, shown in continual and sub- 
stantial offices of charity and helpfulness, and with 
no other outward display, no other sign of union, 
than the daily life devoted to works of mutual good- 
will, and distinguished from the world by the broth- 
erly spirit, the very first grace, the most notable 



314 WHERE ARE WE? 

grace, of this church of brothers. The word "church," 
you know, means only " an assembly." The very 
life and spirit of the bond which was to hold together 
this church was "humility," humility in thought, 
in character, in office, in action, everywhere and 
every way humility. That certainly took in modesty, 
decent temperance in living; and that certainly ex- 
cluded pride in every shape and color and in every 
place and manner, individual pride and corporation 
pride, pride of the person or pride of the church. 
If, then, standing before Trinity Church, Paul were 
told the use of that magnificent building and made to 
understand why aU that stone, with its costly carving 
and ornamenting, was piled up in that conical form, 
where it could do no good save to please the eye ; if 
he were told what the whole fabric cost, and what is 
the annual and dead loss of interest on that amount 
in a city where thousands are starving and hundreds 
of thousands never hear the gospel preached to 
them, what do you imagine Paul would say? What 
would be his feeling when he went in and heard some 
of his words chanted by a choir of white-surpliced 
boys, to the music of a grand organ pla} r ed by one 
of the first aitists, to a congregation of twenty or 
thirty hearers? I tell you honestly what I think 
about it : I think Paul would, for about an hour, say 
nothing at all. Astonishment would paralyze the 
power of utterance. The disclosure of the facts 
would be a shock greater than he ever suffered when 
the Jews threw stones at him and knocked him down 
in the streets. I have tried to imagine what Paul 



WHERE AHE WE? 315 

would be likely to say when told of the hundreds of 
millions of money invested by us in things which 
were absolutely unknown in his clay, and of whose 
future existence he could hardly even have had a 
vision. Would he not have said, " Brethren, if so 
I can call you, why do you waste this enormous 
amount upon your pride ? What else is it that pro- 
duces this rivalry between your various families, 
which you call 'denominations'? There were no 
1 denominations ' in my day, and we were only too 
glad to get occasional shelter under some friendly 
roof. What surplus we had, we used in relieving the 
poor. You tell me 3'ou have millions of poor among 
you, and you tell me you have systematic taxes to 
help you defray the co-t of instructing the ignorant, 
even in your own country, and teaching them the 
rudiments of the gospel. 

Brethren, let me ask you why you throw away 
these superfluous millions upon your rival pride in 
out-building, out-shining, out-decorating, out-spir- 
ing, one another? Suppose you saved only half the 
cost of your splendid churches ; that would be a 
larger fund than you ever yet thought of raising for 
any other christian purpose. Are you not putting 
pride before utility? Do you not value your houses 
more than people, and churches above souls? Where 
is the old humility? I don't see it in these flar- 
ing marbles, I don't hear it in these magnificent 
organs, I don't see the net result in these enormous 
millions of real estate, that pay nothing to the State, 
and n >thing to the church save what you call "social 
prestige." 



316 WHERE ARE WE? 

But I will leave the mere form or outward sem- 
blance and show of the church. I suppose that no intel- 
ligent man would question that the form of the chris- 
tian church, the outward mould or cast of the religion 
of Jesus, has altered so much that it is by no means 
improbable to suppose that any one of the primitive 
disciples, wakened from his sleep, and brought face 
to face with the outer aspect or the internal polity of 
one of our fashionable modern churches, would find 
himself at a perfect loss, and would need to ask as 
many questions as any child has to ask when he is 
first put through the old catechism ; and I apprehend 
the answers he would get would shed about as much 
li^ht on his mind as the answers the child filets from 
an average teacher of the old school. 

Leaving form, then, and coming to substance, com- 
ing to spirit, I ask if we have to-day, in the religion 
we profess, those characteristic graces of the chris- 
tian spirit which the Master himself taught as the 
essential and dominant traits of his disciples, and 
which, as we learn even from the record of contempo- 
rary heathen historians, were everywhere remarked, 
commented on, and wondered at, as exhibitions of a 
divine genius never seen elsewhere, and hardly to be 
credited to men save upon ocular evidence. 

First of all, we can take the testimony recorded 
in the Acts of the Apostles as to the astonishing 
brotherliness which united the early christians, their 
self-denying love for one another, their perfect readi- 
ness to die for one another, and, what may seem even 
harder to some of us, their promptness in putting all 



WHEKE ARE WE? 317 

their property into a common fund for the sustenance 
and support of the community. 

I will not comment upon this early picture of the 
christian character, and ask you whether you think a 
modern photograph repeals the same strong and sig- 
nificant lines, but I will turn rather to a portrait 
drawn in the first century by a pagan author, by the 
hand of the younger Pliny, and I will ask you whether 
you think you could set up that portrait to-day as 
a true likeness of the average disciple of Christ. 
Pliny, in reporting to the Emperor Trajan, gives 
what he has found to be the most common, the most 
striking, and the most clannish distinctions of the 
christian sect, — those in which they most signally 
and widely differed from the rest of mankind ; and 
among these he specially notes the fact that they 
bound themselves by a solemn oath " not to commit 
fraud, or theft, or other immoral act, nor to break 
their word, nor to betray a trust." 

Let us remember that at that time the qualities 
named were those by which christians were dis- 
tinguished from their fellow-men, which they did 
not share largely with them, and in the display of 
which they rose above them as the eagle soars above 
the swallow. Of course at that time the pagan 
world was living in a morality of its own, while now 
the whole world receives and professes the morality 
of the then despised christians. But I ask you 
whether you think this fact explains the whole 
problem of the enormous difference you find between 
the relative positions of the church then and now? 



318 ' WHERE ARE WE? 

Is the difference due altogether to the moral educa- 
tion of the world aud to its growing up to the church 
in the virtues of the christian code ? Or has there 
not been also a fearful lapse from that code on the 
part of christians? You can # test the matter in one 
way. You can tell whether christians have fallen 
away by asking how they have kept up their old 
reputation of strict companionship, how they have 
preserved that old prestige of being the most loving 
and brotherly of all societies on earth. Right under 
the eaves of the church we have societies now formed 
for the very purpose of doing what love and brother- 
hood in the church would always have done, if they 
had kept up the virtue of their names. It was once 
enough for any man to say, "I am a christian ! " to 
call forth responsive charity and sympathy from 
every fellow-christian. Now the talisman has to be 
sought in Freemasonry or some other compact of 
that kind ; and I conclude that, with the wide spread 
of our religion, there has been a weakening of its 
central and cardinal virtues. We have need to de- 
velop anew the principle of love, in the old apos- 
tolic sense and manner, and to take from the world, 
outside the church, all claim and all apology for try- 
ing to make up what is fouud lacking in the church. 
I have blushed to listen to the stories that are still 
told, of the utter inadequacy of the name of Jesus 
to bring help to a wounded soldier, while the grip or 
sign of some secret society saved hundreds of ex- 
posed lives, and soothed the pains and softened the 
pillows of thousands of dying men. And it was the 



WHERE ARE WE? 319 

sense of what was so nobly effected by the mere 
passwords and hand-grips of these societies, that 
gave spur to the activity of our Young Men's Chris- 
tian Associations, and made the members and repre- 
sentatives of these bodies at last the most honored 
stewards of our charity, the kindest ministers in the 
death-stricken hospital, and the most faithful and 
welcome comforters that ever knelt on the bloody sod 
of a battle-field, by the side of the wounded and 
dying. 

And I believe that it is in this practical way, by a 
sensible and material incorporation of the christian 
spirit in the living institutions and for the crying 
needs of the time, it is in this solid and irresistible 
way we are to gain back for the church of Jesus its 
old repute as the highest commissioner of the divine 
love, the best and purest example of generous hearts, 
honest tongues, loving words, and helpful hands. 

Certainly we need a reform, and one that shall 
search deeper and cut more keenly than any the 
church has known for long ages. Every shrewd ob- 
server of the signs of the times, every sagacious stu- 
dent of the laws of history, every earnest friend of a 
humane religion and a christian humanity, can dis- 
cern the necessity and see the materials crystallizing 
for a great reform. The clash of controversial 
weapons proclaims it. The fermenting germs of new 
thought proclaim it. The common restlessness of the 
age is a prophecy of its coming. The deepest feel- 
ing of unbelief is almost an intuition of the solemn 
truth, that in the ages to come Jesus will be the one 



320 WHERE ARE WE? 

name of authority, or it will fall into the rank of 
older and merely human teachers, like Confucius, 
Plato, and Sakj^a Muni. The reform may not come 
in your day or mine, but come it will and must. 
God is throwing up, by all the silent forces of the 
time, a new highway for his people to march upon ; 
and the old gospel, rejuvenated and rebaptized from 
heaven, will girdle the world with universal love, 
peace, and brotherhood. 



I GO A FISHING. 



"I go a fishing." — John xxi, 3. 

You will not think I have been drawn to this text 
by the apparent singularity of the proposition it con- 
tains. When isolated from its context and enunciated 
by itself, this feature might well deter us from the 
choice, if it were not overlaid by the deep shadow of 
an impressive meaning. And it must be owned it is 
rather the shadow of a meaning, than the sense of the 
words, which lends the text its significance ; for when 
we read it, we project into it a coloring of thought 
from the context ; we remark it only as a salient 
angle in a long line of wall, and we think very little 
of the words, as an inJepeudent statement, "I go 
a fishing." We do not try to discover any important 
sense in them, apart from their connection with the 
general narrative. We may, indeed, feel pretty sure 
that the narrative has not been thrown into this 
dramatic form without an important reason. John 
could have introduced the scene that follows, and 
recorded the miracle, without the pains of changing 
the third to the first person, for he could have told 
us simply that the disciples had gone fishing. But 
the careful manner in which the details are described 



322 "i go 

shows us that John attached a special significance to 
them, and that he evidently reproduced them just as 
they occurred. It is plain that the conversation 
which took place on this occasion was of extraordi- 
nary interest, and left a deep and abiding impression 
on the mind of the evangelist. And there is also a 
distinct wish to give prominence to Peter in that con- 
versation. There seems an intention to emphasize 
his share in it, and to represent him as chiefly respon- 
sible for the decision to which it led. Across the 
field of the narrative there flit, to a careful and 
scrutinizing eye, the thin, gauze-like vapors of a 
doubtful sky, and the historian feels his way cau- 
tiously, as if he were apprehensive of a coming 
storm. Of course, when he wrote, he could have no 
such feelings, for he wrote after the issue of the 
decision he records ; but he appears to write with 
the remembrance of the feeling he had at the time, 
and that feeling gives its peculiar mould and hue 
to the record. We can believe he would have 
chosen just such a mode of introduction for the 
episode. We can feel how entirely suitable the 
present style would have been if the result of the 
decision made by the apostles had been different ; 
if the decision had led to some unhappy conclusion, 
and compromised in any way the great mission of the 
disciples, or jeoparded the interests and hopes of 
the christian cause. In that case we can well un- 
derstand that John would have taken pains to write 
carefully, and to give every one his due measure of 
responsibility, and to let the blame fall, if blame 



323 



had been, on the head of the bold leader, so prompt 
to decide, and so energetic to carry out his decision. 

But if, in the event of misfortune, John would 
have felt obliged to place Peter on the eminence 
he had chosen for himself, he seems to have felt it 
unjust, now that the resolution had beeu approved 
by the event, not to give Peter the benefit of his 
actual share in it and eager suasion of it. 

These considerations may convince us that the 
occasion was deemed one of great moment, and that 
the minds of the disciples were agitated by conflict- 
ing sentiments. It was evidently no casual conver- 
sation, but a solemn deliberation on the part of those 
met together, of which we have in the record only 
the final resolve. 

And if we look at the names of those who came 
together, men who, both geographically and pro- 
fessionally, lived by the sea, and then look at the 
decision, we cannot doubt what practical question it 
was which so deeply interested them ; it was, " to 
fish, or not to fish." But they did not raise this 
question as philosophers ; they had no fastidious 
delicacy on the subject, such as, long before their 
day, had entered into the religion and the customs 
of the Brahmins. In any case, their Master's ex- 
ample and approval would have satisfied their scru- 
ples. Nor did they start the question as mere 
amateurs, anxious only to get an excuse for indulg- 
ing a favorite sport or pastime. 

No man can contrive to turn his business into a 
pastime, and fishing was the disciples' handicraft; 



324 "i GO A FISHING." 

fish was bread to them, and they maintained them- 
selves by the net profits of the sea. But why,. then, 
should they treat the subject with such gravity ? If 
they needed money, and fishing was their habitual 
mode of obtaining it, why should they not go at 
once, as they had been used to dj, go as a matter 
of course, and without holding any argument upon 
the propriety of their doing so? We say, the pro- 
priety of doing so, for it seems inconsistent that 
John should have recorded the deliberation, if it had 
revolved around the point of necessity alone. If 
these disciples had been pressed only by the natural 
anxieties of an empty purse, why should they not 
have sought relief, as, no doubt, they had often done, 
and why should they have held a discussion of such 
a tenor as provoked the short, incisive declaration of 
Peter, "I go a fishing"? This declaration is per- 
fectly characteristic of Peter ; it is full of his intense 
personality, and sounds like a piece of harp-string, 
strained almost to breaking. We know Peter so 
well that, if we had not been told who it was that 
spoke these words, we should have known it was 
Peter, the sentence is so like his work, hammered 
out with two or three rapid, muscular strokes, and 
evidently while the metal is hot, for you can always 
discover some cinders from the forge adhering to it 
or beaten into it. What can it have been that 
evoked this crisp, curt, emphatic avowal ? And what 
is the precise temper which scintillates so briskly in 
these words, throws off this seemingly sudden shower 
of sparks, and then subsides into quietness? Is there 



"i GO A FISHING." 325 

any of that old Adam, and a very ancient Adam it 
was, which burst forth in Peter's passionate, "I 
know not the man"? There was there more of the 
fisherman than of the disciple. Does the text show 
that the fisherman was again wrestling with the dis- 
ciple in Peter, and getting a decided advantage over 
him ? 

And can it have been John's intention, in writing 
the account so particularly, to show us that the Sea 
of Galilee had not yet lost its savor in the great 
apostle? How can we answer such questions? Of 
course we can give no perfectly satisfactory answers ; 
but I think that if we look carefully at the circum- 
stances we shall be able to arrive at answers ex- 
ceedingly probable and instructive. 

The disciples were then in a condition which fully 
justifies the adjuncts of embarrassment and per- 
plexity. We must not judge that condition by our 
own feelings, we must not throw back upon it the 
clear light of after events; and especially, we must 
not fail to remember how weak, spiritually, the dis- 
ciples then were, weak in their apprehension of 
christian teachings ; weak in faith, as Jesus had often 
called them ; and weak and extremely confused in 
their appreciation of the stupendous revolution which 
was silently gathering force, and from the sepulchre 
where Jesus had lain was soon to roll forth in an 
overwhelming tide of moial life and power. 

We must remember that the disciples had at that 
time no substantive faith in the resurrection; that 
they very seriously doubted the fact itself when first 

14 



326 " I GO A FISHING." 

reported to them, and thus showed how exceedingly 
limited their hopes were in that direction, and how 
intangible and indefinite was their expectation of the 
immediate future. All their ignorance, their infir- 
mity, their uncultured bias, and even their strong 
christian feeling, must have been wrought upon by 
their condition to an extraordinary degree of inten- 
sity, and their condition was such as to bring out, 
not the strong, but the w r eaker and more selfishly 
human elements of character. For they had leaned on 
Christ, if not with the docility, yet certainly with the 
simplicity of little children ; and when they saw their 
beloved Master struck down by the iron hand of 
power, when they beheld their romantic visions of 
empire dissipated by his death, unable to see 
across the grave which had opened to receive their 
Lord and their hopes, not yet sustained by the Com- 
forter, and poor in everything save in a few tantaliz- 
ing memories, they had not been human not to 
have felt a crushing sense of loneliness, darkness, 
and helplessness. What anxiety must have harassed 
them, what fears must have beset them, what ter- 
rible suspense, and how often they must have asked 
one another, " What shall we do ? " 

This is the question which Peter decides. We may 
suppose that some were less hot and restless than he, 
and were in favor of continuing their vigilant waiting 
upon events. Naturally, Peter's fellow-craftsmen 
would gather about him, and these seem to have 
retired from the main body and discussed the subject 
apart, and with reference to their own interest. The 



327 

mere energy of Peter's words leads us to believe 
that they were a reply to something said by the 
others. Perhaps it was argued that duty demanded 
of them a hopeful patience. Jesus might appear to 
them, and set their doubts at rest forever. And that 
was the place for them to keep up their guard on 
events ; there they had lost, and there they should 
expect to find their Master. Such may have been the 
more cautious counsel. 

But the soul of Peter, that fiery mass of melted 
metal seething in a furnace full of rough ore and 
charcoal, that compact, sea-going engine in a three- 
decked river-craft, the soul of Peter had reached 
the limits of patience. His anxieties and doubts had 
fermented into a restlessness he could not control ; if 
he could find a safety-valve, he meant to learn its use 
and enjoy its benefit. He was not really disheart- 
ened, he was terribly uneasy. He did not mean to 
abandon a jot of hope, but he wanted a respite from 
the wear and tear of thought and solicitude. He 
was weary of waiting on events, and desired to give 
events a chance to wait on him. He was gloomy in 
the shadow of the awful scenes he had witnessed, 
and he craved the broad, free sunshine out on the 
lake. He could not pry into the future, and he was 
tired of watching for it. Others might stay and 
keep vigil if they pleased, but his purpose was taken : 
"/go fishing." 

We see no more, then, in this language than a 
pretty liberal rendering of frail human nature, a 
phase of character which, like the advertising side 



328 "i GO A FISHING." 

of a newspaper, is exceedingly diversified in the 
particulars, but excessively monotonous in the gen- 
eral appearance; an underlying stratum of selfish 
timidity and impatience, which crops out even in the 
best christians, and, like a line of cliffs or a ridge of 
clay, piles up a slope of unclean and treacherous de- 
bris over some of the best and most fruitful christian 
graces. Men that can stand up against the sever- 
est shocks, are unable sometimes to stand alone, the 
moment they are required to do nothing but stand. 
The hardest thing a christian farmer could be asked 
to do, is to see how his crops take care of themselves 
in a time of drought, and how God takes care of him 
in a time of famine. We can joyfully assist in the 
salvation of God, we can believe in it, work for it, 
and make ready for it ; but the difficulty arises when 
we are commanded to " stand still and see " it. The 
ark may be coming back in triumph, and we feel 
sure no harm can befall it ; yet if the wheels encount- 
er a stone, and the cart lean a little, and the ark 
begin to tremble, up go our hands, and we wish to 
loan a little strength to the arm of the Almighty. 
Our faith is most needed just where God's work be- 
gins, and there it oftenest fails. We preach, we 
pray, we teach, we toil with unabated courage while 
the Master is with us, but if the shadow of his tem- 
porary absence fall upon us, if any cross of disap- 
pointment or trial plant itself in our prosperous way, 
if any clouds settle between us and the future, if 
instead of the gold and silver of immediate reward, 
we are asked to take for a time the word of promise, 



"I GO A FISHING." 329 

that letter of unlimited credit on the riches of God's 
power and goodness, how prone \ye are to impatience, 
how mauy of us yield to doubt, grow tired of the 
old path, and are anxious to strike out a new one. 
Such are the times that try the faith of the church, 
set all the feverish egotisms of our nature efferves- 
cing, make us dissatisfied with the present, and uneasy 
for the future, and always betray a large number of 
whom the best record that can be made, will tell that, 
like Peter, they went fishing. 

It is a truth that our religion needs a firm root to 
resist the incessant attacks of natural worry and im- 
patience. It takes a strong man to overcome the 
discourasrinsr effects of the conviction that he has 
gone wrong, and especially if he thinks his convic- 
tion is shared by others. Thousands are turned for- 
ever from the paths of wisdom, because, being weak, 
and no man helping them, they yield to the impulse 
of the first little misstep ; and thousands of now 
silent, idle, languishing christians have been made 
such by their first fit of despondency, or their first 
fever of impatience with their brethren. If we gave 
way in our worldly callings as we do in our christian 
duties to the petty irritations of disappointment, 
fretfulness, and care, we should see our business 
signs changed every week. Shall necessity make us 
constant, and love be mastered by fickleness? Shall 
we give thp w r orld an energy, a dauntless courage, a 
hopeful perseverance, which we deny to the service 
of our Master? Shall we overcome mountains for 
Caesar, and stumble at mole-hills in the path of chris- 
tian duty? 



330 

There are seasons, indeed, when our condition as 
christians becomes almost as trying as was that of 
Peter and his brethren; and when, if the merciful 
Saviour did not reveal himself to us, as he did to 
Peter, we might lose sight of him forever. Those 
are the times when, just as in his case, the most pow- 
erful human instincts come into collision with our too 
feeble christian graces, and the strife harasses us till 
we seek for peace at the expense of our souls, and 
by the sacrifice of that nobler and purer development 
which God had sought for us in our trials. We 
stand, like Peter, with sorrowful memories in our 
hearts, bowed down by some heavy grief. A grave 
has opened in the very centre of our joys, and we have 
spoken a farewell which cost half our hearts. Around 
that grave our thoughts linger like mourners ; back to 
it we are drawn, by love and regret, in every respite 
from our duties ; and there, where so much of life 
went down out of our mortal sight, where we lost so 
much of what made life sweet and gave beauty and 
charm to its labors, and zest to its enjoyments, there, 
too often we lose, with our dear earthly friends, the 
presence of a dearer Friend, whose smile is hid by 
our veil of tears and whose love is thrust aside by 
our impetuous grief. We have not patience or cour- 
age to sit down, like the patriarch, on the dead ashes 
of our great loss, and school our hearts to the 
brave fortitude of a faith that looks upward and on- 
ward, waiting to catch the first gleam of returning 
light, to hear the first footfall of the coming Mas- 
ter. Let our hearts linger, as they love to linger, 



"i GO A FISHING," 331 

like Mary, around the sepulchre where so many 
precious trusts are confided to God ; let our love 
:md our tears commingle, like the spices which Mary 
brought, over the sacred dust we cherish ; but let 
ns carry with us, as Mary did, the sense of a liv- 
ing, not a dead, companionship; the feeling that 
makes the grave a part of life, not the end of it, 
and helps us turn from it always, as she did, to 
find the Saviour with us, and lay down at his feet 
and commit to his care and the power of his resur- 
rection, the whole wealth of our memories, our af- 
fections, our friendships, and our hopes. 

Shall we follow the Saviour while he leads us in 
his mercy along the pleasant ways of peace, and 
turn aside when the path of trouble opens before 
us? Shall we cling to him while we see him in 
the clear splendors of our bright and happy days, 
and desert him because he asks us to tread with 
him: the vale of cypress and yew, or kneel with him 
in the lonely garden of olives, or wait for him t 
the door of the sepulchre? We can rejoice with 
Christ, we can walk with Christ, we can work with 
Christ ; can we not watch with him, and can we not 
wait for him ? 

I look over the ranks of our christian disciple- 
ship in these days of interval between hope and 
harvest, in this time of anxious forecast, and the 
hollows show me that scores and hundreds have left, 
to put themselves afloat, and many of them adrift, 
upon the Tiberias of their own self-seeking; and 
my hope for them is that, as they could not stay 



332 "I GO A FISHING." 

for Christ, Christ may seek them once more, as he 
did Peter, and win them from their entanglement 
in their worldly nets, and call them back to their 
higher and grander mission. Peter and his com- 
panions toiled all night in vain ; and no wonder, 
since they toiled consciously without Christ. And 
deserting christians may take their failure as a warn- 
ing. There are storms on that sea which may yet 
call them to bewail the absence of Him who speaks 
peace to the winds and waves. There are perils 
there which may make them mourn the day when 
they forsook Christ, in their hurry to get money, and 
went without him to tempt the uncertain deep of 
earthly fortunes. 

Let them come back and tarry with their brethren. 
Let us pray and wait together till our Lord come 



JOY OF CHRIST'S FELLOWSHIP. 



" And blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me." — 
Matt, xi, 6. 

When we reflect who Jesus was, we can but admire 
the self-re tent iou, the withdrawing of his own per- 
son, which shows itself in his earlier miuistry. He 
had many reasons for this, but one was, that he 
might leave his character and mission to be judged 
by his works. To these he makes his appeal, behind 
these he takes his stand, and in the inextinguishable 
splendor of these he leaves his friends and his ene- 
mies to discover, for themselves, the divinity that 
inspired his speech and wrought in his power. And 
when John's disciples, depressed perhaps by the 
evil fortunes of their master, and doubtful of the 
end, came to Jesus with their painfully suggestive 
question, "Art thou He that should come, or look we 
for another?" — that is, Ought we to labor for 
another? — Jesus made no dogmatic assertion of 
his Messiahship, he entered into no argument on the 
subject ; his goodness and his wisdom were too great 
and patient and penetrating to take these short but 
unsatisfying methods. He kept the disciples with 
him that they might judge for themselves ; and when 
they hid used their own eyes, and filled their own 

14* 



334 joy of Christ's fellowship. 

understandings with materials of a just opinion, he 
sent them back to tell John, "The blind receive their 
sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and 
the deaf hear, the dead are raised up and the poor have 
the gospel preached to them . . . and blessed is he 
whosoever shall not be offended in me." No declara- 
tion here of who or what he is, no category of divine 
dignities and powers, no stern rebuke of the doubt that 
impeached his own personal and sacred majesty, no 
list of his wonderful offices, but a list of his matchless 
deeds, no summary of doctrine, but a summary of 
practice which dazzled the world. It was as much 
as to say, You seek to know what I am. Look, then, 
at my image. If I bear judgment of myself, my 
judgment is not true : then take the judgment which 
others have borne of me ; and if you desire to see 
my godhead, look not at my person, but look where 
it is reflected, by the gleams of ancient prophecy 
and the lustre of unparalleled wonder-working, in 
those around me. You want the testimony, perhaps, 
of learned rabbis and doctors : but I call my wit- 
nesses from no school and no synagogue. You would 
ask, perhaps, like some others, Have any of the 
rulers or the Pharisees believed on him? but I take 
my converts from a very different class, and set on 
them such au impress of my mastership that not 
what they sa} r , but what they are, is enough to show 
whether the world must look for a mightier than I. 
The dumb are my witnesses, the lame are my cour- 
iers, and the blind my messengers ; the deaf are my 
scholars, and the lepers belong to my family ; the 



joy or Christ's fellowship. 335 

dead listen to my voice, and the poor are my heirs. 
If yon are proud, these things may shock your pride ; 
if you are ambitious, they may humble your designs ; 
if you are timid, they may make you afraid in view 
of the consequences : but these are the signs of the 
Messiah, and these are my works ; and blessed is he 
who shall not be offended in me ! 

What is the character of the offence here spoken 
of? What is it to be offended in Christ? The lit- 
eral translation would be, "shall not be scandalized 
in me." The axavSalov, or scandal, originally meant 
that one of the sticks used in a trap, which supports 
the trap, and determines its spring or fall. Hence 
it came to denote anything which occasioned one 
to fall or stumble ; and thus generally, as applied 
to the mind, "to be scandalized," or, as our ver 
sion has rendered it, giving the precise Latin equiv- 
alent, for offendo means to stumble at something. 
To be offended in any one signified to be shocked, 
grieved, displeased, at something in his person, 
character, or deeds ; to make a scandal of it, or 
stumble at it. The term has, then, a very wide 
range, and is by no means restricted to any special 
kind of dislike or disaffection, or to any oue degree 
of disfavor or alienation. 

Jesus evidently comprehended by it every class of 
unfriendly feeling and every grade of cold, unsym- 
pathizing, or active, disdainful aversion. Let us 
now look at the form of the Saviour's declaration : 
" Blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in 
me." Of course we must infer that this affirmative 



336 joy or Christ's fellowship. 

condemns the negative ; this blessing of the innocent 
implies the censure of the guilty ; if those are happy 
who take care to avoid stumbling at Jesus, those 
must be miserable who are offended in him. Notice 
the peculiarity of the phrase "offended in me." Jesus 
cares little for an ill-feeling which is aimed only at 
him. We remember his merciful saying, " Whoso- 
ever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall 
be forgiven him, but whosoever speaketh against the 
Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him." His love 
could pardon any slight to his own personal and pri- 
vate dignity ; and where men feel most keenly, and 
cherish deepest resentment, he felt only a tender 
sorrow, and lost all thought of self in his concern 
for the sinner's soul. Not what was his merely, but 
what was in him; not the personal character which 
stood before the world, but the divine, official majes- 
ty which looked through him upon the world ; not 
the Son of man, but the Son of God and the Re- 
deemer of men, this was the aspect which accentu- 
ated and ennobled Jesus' whole consideration of him- 
self, and this gave its gravamen and deadliness to 
the sin of being offended in him. 

And it is a noteworthy fact that few, if any, ever 
took offence at Jesus for what he was. Malice did 
its utmost ; envy, with all the aids of persecuting 
power, sought to rend that robe which it could not 
defile, and which was stainless as it was seamless : 
yet from the lips of enemies came praise, and the 
poison of calumnious tongues was changed to honey. 
It was not Jesus the Jews hated, but what they saw 



JOY OF CHRIST'S FELLOWSHIP. 337 

in Jesus ; not the Saviour they feared and railed at, 
but what he said and did. They would have hon- 
ored such a mighty teacher, but then he preached 
the gospel to the poor, and he " taught the people as 
one having authority and not as the scribes." They 
would have liked the companionship of so spotless 
and godlike a man, but he kept company with publi- 
caus, and was the friend of sinners. It was their 
pride that took offence, their bigotry and their spirit 
of caste ; and their fastidious and insolent pharisa- 
ism ; and when Jesus looked round on these weak, 
selfish, vainglorious stumblers, with what pertinence 
he could turn to the multitude, and with what 
overcharge of apt, allusive meaning he could say, 
"Blessed are the poor in spirit." And when he saw 
so many men, called great, learned, powerful, unable 
to find their way to him, and stumbling at all that 
was best auddivinest in him, with what point of con- 
viction and what weight of demonstration he could 
add, ff Verily, I say unto you, except ye become as 
little children, ye shall in no case enter into the 
kingdom of heaven." 

We sometimes think that if we had lived in the 
days of our Saviour, and had seen his works and 
heard his teaching, we should have been among the 
foremost of his disciples ; and men who pay but 
little heed to the gospel are strenuous in their con- 
demnation of the old scribes and Pharisees. So Dr. 
Blair once exclaimed in one of his sermons, that if 
men could only once see virtue embodied, they would 
all fall in love with it, and do it swift reverence ; 



338 

but a moie thoughtful teacher than Dr. Blair replied 
that men had seen virtue embodied, they saw it 
in the Lord Jesus ; and they despised it, and nailed 
it to the cross. 

We are doing the verv thing which looks so 
shameful, so unreasonable, so cruel in those who 
turned from Christ in the days of his flesh, and we 
are doing it with less excuse and fewer grounds tor 
palliation than they had. For them the question, 
whether Jesus was the Christ, was, at least, an open 
one, and they had someprima facie evidence in their 
favor ; but for us it is a res adjudicata, a settled 
question, and no man can raise it without lifting 
the burden of eighteen centuries, and turning his 
back on the sun to trim the little lamp of his own 
self-sufficiency. Those old slighters and scoffers 
knew Jesus by only a fraction of his life and a few 
scraps of his doctrines : we know him by all that 
the love of his disciples, and the care of Divine Prov- 
idence have preserved for us. He stands before us 
in the perfect glory of his doctrines and history, 
in the immortality of his suffering and doings, and 
in the full-grown ripeness of the institutions he 
founded. He speaks to us by more voices than the 
Jews ever heard, by more miracles than they ever 
saw, by more witnesses than court ever gathered or 
judge ever listened to. He pleads with men by an 
agency unknown till his agonies invoked it, and his 
blood baptized it, and over all human hearts he 
weaves that secret net-work of celestial powers 
through which his Holy Spirit seeks to arrest the 



JOY OF chetst's fellowship. 339 

sinner, and win his heart aid bind it to the cross. 
More fully, more constantly, more persuasively, if 
possible, than he ever did to the Jews, does the 
Saviour present himself to us, and " blessed is he 
who is not offended in him." 

Now this feeling of offence in Christ must exist in 
the case of every impenitent man, and of every one 
who does not accept the entire responsibility of the 
christian life. And that we may be convinced of 
this, let us observe that this feeling, which our 
Master condemns, is not necessarily a feeling of 
antagonism and hostility. There are many who 
have no consciousness of opposition to Christ, and 
who would indignantly disavow any indulgence of 
a spirit of enmity or even unfriendliness. It would 
be impossible to convince them that they are of- 
fended, in the common sense of the word; but that 
is not charged on them. They belong to the class 
of aloof Pharisees, those who lifted no hand against 
Jesus and entered no conclave of plotters to betray 
him, who heurd him, perhaps gladly, and yet gave 
no sign and kept their own counsel ; and these mod- 
ern resemblers have need to ponder those words 
which pronounced the Master's solemn judgment 
on their ancient prototypes, "He that is not with us, 
is against us." 

I have said there are many such, but I ought to 
have said, there are a few such, and not many. For 
1 do not believe anv man's indifference can be brought 
to such a state of stable equilibrium as to leave no 
evident preponderance of motives. Why are these 



340 joy of Christ's fellowship. 

men indifferent? If they see Christ so clearly and 
approve his gospel so heartily, as they say, why 
do they keep themselves aloof? What can make 
one so heedless of a truth he believes ? What can 
tempt one to bring upon his conscience the sin of 
K knowing to do good and doing it not " ? Are not 
such men, in fact, offended in Christ? and if they 
looked narrowly into their hearts, would they not be 
forced to discover there secret reasons for their pres- 
ent attitude, and to own that they do find stumbling- 
blocks in the way to Christ, and are making the 
existence of these an excuse for their carelessness? 
Would not some of them be compelled to admit, with 
one of the brothers Haldane, "I used to think I was 
entirely fair, impartial, and candid, and that I was 
holding the scales with an even poise and justly weigh- 
ing the claims of God's word upon me ; but I see now 
that I was governed throughout by a vast pride of in- 
tellect and a secret self-flattery that I was so inde- 
pendent of the opinions of others and dared act 
differently"? 

And is it not astonishing that men will overturn so 
much truth which they acknowledge and seem to feel, 
for so trivial a cause ? They will erase a whole page 
for one little blot. They will pluck the whole flower 
to pieces, because a fly has walked over one of the 
petals. Like those who heard Jesus' discourse on the 
spiritual bread, they are ready to go back and walk 
no more with him because of one hard saying, one in- 
soluble mystery. 

I confess there is but one way in which I can ac- 



JOY or chkist's fellowship. 341 

count for this immense difficulty at trifles, this facility 
of swallowing the camel, with this sensitive shrinking 
from the gnat. I believe the trifles are seized on, 
generally, by the latent enmities of the heart : the 
gnat is welcomed as an excuse, and brought into a 
prominence which its own insignificance would never 
have given to it. I do not wish to discredit the per- 
fect good faith of honest doubters in the minor things 
of the gospel ; there are such among us ; but I ask 
every man's heart if he does not find his doubts de- 
termine their value and their influence according to 
his moods of mind, and if he is not most careful in 
tending them and keeping them warm and comfortable, 
when the state of his conscience leads him to seek 
refuge in the dark, because he cannot bear the light, 
and he finds doubts and excuses very good company, 
as they always are for a backslidden disciple or a 
half-persuaded unbeliever. 

But how can we reject the immense body of chris- 
tian truth, because we stumble at some apparent 
difficulty in one of its members? How can we dis- 
own Christ in the greatness and power which we 
understand, for some little word of his which we do 
not understand ? How can we venture on the ship- 
wreck of our whole faith and our own souls, because 
we have a scruple at some small thing which is re- 
quired of us? 

For I will not speak of that notorious, active, and 
malignant offence which is exhibited by those who 
expressly disclaim belief in the gospel and the 
Saviour. These are not stumblers, they are leapers 



342 joy of Christ's fellowship. 

and precipitators. To stumble in a path implies that 
one is willing to enter it, at least ; to stumble over 
a difficulty necessitates that one shall have travelled 
up to it ; and to be offended in Christ means that one 
would heartily accept Christ but for some special 
obstacles, over which he cannot make his way. 

What is the nature of these special obstacles? 
What are the stumbling-blocks which keep so many 
from the open and fearless following of Christ ? Some 
are stumbling, no doubt, at something in Christ's 
teaching; nothing they can object to, nothing they 
would presume to question as unworthy of the exalted 
character of Jesus, or inconsistent with that discipline 
of souls which fits them for the kingdom of God ; but it 
is something which offends the inbred conceit of human 
nature, that peculiar something which has made the 
cross of Christ an offence to sinners even from the 
beginning. They do not know just what it is, they 
would be loath to attempt to explain what it is ; it is 
the original viciousness of self-will, the high-headed- 
ness of gay and thoughtless youth, the selfish mo- 
nopoly of the world in the heart of middle age, the 
stereotyped and deep-indented habits of age ; it is 
the reckless ambition of one, the vain pride of 
another, the animal joyousness of a third, the sheer 
timidity of another, the dull, unreceptive, passive 
stolidity of another; it is everything in the old 
Adam of the human heart which protests against re- 
pentance, because it is humbling ; hates the path of 
close obedience, because it is self-denying ; prefers 
the pleasures of sin for a season, because their season 



joy of Christ's fellowship. 343 

is now, and they press an invitation that demands 
no thought, no self-abasement, no disregard of estab- 
lished habits to accept and to comply with. 

Such stumblers as these hardly know at what they 
stumble. They look at Jesus, not with disdainful or 
defiant eye, but only with the vacant and unmeaning 
regard of hearers whose hearts have no connection 
with their ears, and listeners whose design is no deeper 
than mere curiosity or habitual tolerance of an un- 
avoidable duty. 

I believe the great majority are of this class, pas- 
sively, not actively offended in Christ, and only need- 
ing that some urgent circumstance should drive them 
to Jesus, or some bitter trial humble them enough 
to make them feel how much better it would be to 
have him with them, than all the opinions of the 
world, with him far from them. 

And is not Jesus, my friends, soliciting some of 
you by trials? The methods of his love are infinite. 
He will try every string that love or grief or pain 
can stretch and sound in your hearts, ere he give you 
up and over to your own blind choosing. This he 
has taught you, and this he has shown, by the experi- 
ence of thousands. If he is now speaking to you 
out of a cloud of tribulation and through the dark- 
ness of a season of grief, I beg you to hear him, 
and to bow your heads in humble submission to his 
teaching. Stumble not at the severity of your trial 
or at the unknowable mystery of his providences ; but 
draw near to him, and you shall see light spring up 
in your darkness ; give your hearts to him, and you 



344 joy of Christ's fellowship. 

shall find a treasure more precious than any which 
God has taken from you, and you shall know the 
blessedness of those who are not offended in Jesus. 
But I believe there is a large number who are offended 
in Christ because they dislike something which they 
find in the ordinances and institutions of his church. 
They do not stop to inquire whether their offence lies 
against what Jesus enjoined or against the perversions 
and abases of men. I think these have less excuse 
than any other, and are more deeply guilty of that 
sin against which Jesus warned us. These are such 
as reject the commandments because those who are 
christians disobey them, who will not enter the 
church because they see how many unworthy members 
the church entertains. If they had been the eleven 
disciples, they would have left the Master because he 
kept Judas Iscariot in his company ; and you may 
give their self-justification its extremest weight, and 
what does it amount to, more than the same self- 
righteous reasoning, with the old Pharisees, who 
would not own Jesus because he feasted with 
publicans ? Is it worse for the disciples to be found 
with delinquent, and even wicked and apostate 
brethren, than it was for their Master? Is it a 
greater reproach for the church to deal long and 
tenderly and foibearingly with her negligent mem- 
bers, than it was for Jesus to associate with the 
outcasts and reprobates of society? Are not you, 
my friends, who so hold up the blameworthiness 
of the church which invites you, and into which 
Jesus calls }^ou, in the same rank with the old, 



joy of Christ's fellowship. 345 

supercilious Pharisees, who turued their backs on 
Je^us because their exalted pride and scorn did not 
like his surroundings, and held in contempt the com- 
pany he kept? I think this occasion of stumbling, 
this ground of offence, is the most unreasonable of 
all. It asks of those who use it such enormous con- 
cessions, it so boldly proclaims that we are never to 
do good except in select positions and with irre- 
proachable witnesses. It so plainly and stoutly insists 
that we are not to do right save when right-doers are 
plentiful, and there is less need of our particular 
right-doing. It tells a man he ought to stay out in 
the pelting storm because there is a leak in the 
friendly roof that offers him shelter ; he is not bound 
to be honest, because so many who professed to be 
honest have proved to be rogues ; he is at liberty to 
thrust a beggar from his door, because his neighbor 
has just done the same thing ; he is at liberty to float 
or drive his skiff over the fall, because a much more 
competent and loud-boasting sailor than he has just 
plunged over. There is no comparison, no example, 
that can do full justice to the grievous wrong and 
the fatal deceit of those who reject the high com- 
mands of Jesus, and slight the first duties of the 
christian life, for the reason that they deem the 
church corrupt and christians inconsistent with their 
profession. 

I have preached on this theme, my friends, till 
I hardly know what further I can say. It is only 
the tumult of your active cares which prevents you 
from discovering the error of your judgment. But 



346 joy or cheist's "fellowship. 

I entreat you to think bow much better, wiser, and 
safer it would be for you to snatch } r our hearts out 
of the whirl of your present occupations, and give 
this subject its due attention, than to wait till the 
solemn ushering of death and the shades of the 
eternal world shall still that tumult for you, and 
leave you, in the loneliness of your hearts and the 
bitterness of your convictions, to repent that you 
have turned so often away from your Saviour and 
slighted his compassionate and gentle entreaties, be- 
cause you, in your pride or your folly, were " offended 
in him." I repeat it, at him you cannot be offended. 
Interpret the mercies of your lives as the persua- 
sives of his love ; let memory recall to you all the 
mediate, but not disguised, calls of his yearning 
pity ; see how he still reaches to you that hand 
which has saved millions of sinking souls and lifted 
from the cross our perishing world to the hope of 
immortality ; try to believe that the truth you now 
hear, preached as he has commanded, is the message 
which he sends you, the same message which has 
given life and joy to all christian hearts, and may 
God help you to judge wisely, and no longer defer 
to join, with heart and life, the gracious Master you 
have so long refused to own. 



THE FULNESS OF CHRIST. 



" Christ is all and in all." — Col. iii, 11. 

This is one of those brief, compact sentences, 
abounding in the New Testament, which seem to col- 
lect and condense the meaning of whole pages and 
chapters, and to crystallize it in a few short, cubic 
words. In these sentences, which the disciple of 
Christ can never forget, because they fasten like 
hooks of gold upon his memory, the very essence 
of the gospel, the spirit which flows through and 
baptizes all its teachings, seems to organize itself 
in universal forms, in all-sided and all-comprehen- 
sive modes of expression. The gospel ever and 
anon sums itself up, sharpens its logic, and points its 
application in these epigrammatic utterances. From 
its spiritual armory we select them, and the Provi- 
dence and Spirit of God often select them as the 
slender but keen and piercing javelins with which to 
slay the proud and wicked heart. We know how 
mighty these weapons of truth have been when 
wielded in the giant hand of a stern but merciful 
Providence. 

Or we may compare these sentences to lenses, that 
not only reveal to us the fair expanses of divine 
truth, but lengthen the range and widen the scope 



348 THE FULNESS OF CHRIST. 

of vision, and enlarge the outlines of every object. 
This telescopic and amplifying power belongs to 
many of those endeared versicles that set before us 
the Saviour and his mission of redemption, as when 
it is said, "Behold the Lamb of God that taketh 
away the sin of the world." And the same power of 
enlargement lies in that emphatic saying of John, 
" God is love." 

The apostle, seeking to exalt the christian life into 
a sovereign union with Christ, and reasoning and ex- 
horting to this end, finally, like the great Master of 
assemblies, drives the nail into a sure place by the 
well-hammered conclusion, "But Christ is all and 
in all"; a sentence that is like solid gold, which, 
though its mass may be very small, can be beaten 
out by the goldsmith into hundreds and thousands of 
leaves for the use and service of art. 

We may consider the text as a universal and as a 
particular truth, for it is, both absolutely and rela- 
tively, a truth. The apostle, without doubt, intended 
by it to set forth Christ's position in the mind and 
life of his disciples ; but equalty well these words set 
forth his position in the mind and life of the world. 

First of all, then, the text is an historical truth 
in the histoiy of the human race, and to the wisest 
and truest study of that history, " Christ is all in all." 
I know that this is not the reading of the world's 
chronicles to the vulgar eye. The records of the 
race are commonly interpreted by the aid of a key 
that has no power over any element in history but 
the human and the earthly ; but in fact there are 
spiritual and divine elements in it. 



THE FULNESS OF CHRIST. 349 

There is a double life in nations and empires, 
there is a pulse of eternity in the veins and arte- 
ries of history. When we look at events from an 
earthly point, we see them under a very small angle, 
that excludes more than half their meaning. We 
must take our post of observation on the heights of 
the past or the coming eternity. " God ruleth in 
the kingdom of men." We are reading the occur- 
rences of life on the under side, and reading them in 
the dark. Oh, how vast will be the difference of 
their significance when God shall have lifted us 
above them, and lighted all around us the myriad 
torches of eternity ! The great purpose of the 
world's history is human redemption, and it is set 
forth in the very oldest and earliest records of our 
race. The great hero of this history is Christ, aud 
those earliest records sing to us the promise of his 
appearing. For four thousand years the heart of 
humanity was beating with the expectation of its Sa- 
viour. The glory of those dark centuries rested on 
the hills of Judaea, culminated in the cross, and gave 
birth to all the splendor of the following time. The 
world is now waiting for Christ. The springs of its 
history are in him aud in his purpose to save it. All 
things are preparing for his triumph. Death has 
been vanquished, the grave has lost its prey, the 
portals of life and immortality have been opened, 
and the angel of grace has been sent forth, "flying 
in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gos- 
pel to preach to every nation, and people, and kin- 
dred, and tongue." The loudest voice, the highest 
15 



350 THE FULNESS OF CHEIST. 

thought, the greatest word in history is Christ. 
w Christ is all and in all." 

Secondly, — This is also a religious truth even 
more obviously. Our intelligence rejects all the 
historical religions but that of Moses and that of the 
gospel ; and as Christ was the end of the one, he is 
the life of the other. Our alternative is, a religion 
that offers Christ as an atoner and Saviour, or a ne- 
gation and rejection of all religion ; and the world is 
fast shedding off from itself, like withered leaves, all 
its old creeds and idolatries, and coming to the same 
alternative. There are men who accept the gospel 
in its records, while they depose the Saviour from 
his throne, and even from his cross. They exalt his 
personal character, but give it only the value of an 
example. They glorify his deeds, but it is with only 
the cheap and tinsel gilding of a martyr's crown. 
They ignore the prime and greatest necessity of the 
sinner, " Ye must be born again " ; and they take 
from Calvary the divine majesty it wears as an altar 
of sacrifice and a mount of expiation, and make it 
what the Jews called it, nothing but a "place of 
skulls." But the whole world is entering into a 
deeper and more spiritual life. Science, philosophy, 
art, are all lifting the human soul with purer and 
nobler aspirations ; and every step of this progress, 
every degree of this elevation, is a new verdict for 
the truth as it is in Christ. There is nowhere a hand 
that can so touch the shrinking spirit and quicken 
it with life as the hand which is held out from the 
cross of Jesus. There is no ointment so precious to 



THE FULNESS OF CHRIST. 351 

the wounded conscience as the blood that was shed 
on that cross. Paul would know nothing but " Christ 
and him crucified" ; but he knew that whoever knows 
this knows everything, for " Christ is all and in all." 
Thirdly, — This is also a moral truth. It inspires 
the system of morality which springs from the gospel, 
and of this morality Christ is the central and domi- 
nating thought. It is a vain belief that you can pre- 
serve the christian morality complete, and yet banish 
from it the idea of Christ with the necessity of his 
offices and relations. This morality differs from any 
other system of morals only or chiefly in the fact 
that its very life-blood is drawn from the spirit of 
Christ. It is a system whose basis is love, love 
begotten in the heart by faith in Christ. It is the 
morality of a regenerated life. The first relation it 
establishes is the bond of fellowship with Christ. 
None but a christian can be a true moralist. You 
may keep outward forms and raise up the shell 
of a moral character, but the vital principle, the soul 
of morals, will be wanting. The very glory that 
crowns the moral precepts of the gospel, their most 
distinctive mark, that which places them so immeas- 
urably beyond and above all the inspirations of 
human wisdom, is the fact that they all grow from 
the christian religion, they are its blossoms, its 
leaves, its fruits. Remember, Christianity first de- 
manded the heart in our moral actions. The great 
question is of that ; and therefore if a man's heart 
is not capable of the christian religion, it is not 
capable of christian morality. Christ, the first in 



352 THE FULNESS OF CHRIST. 

religion, is the first in morals. Here also he "is all 
and in all." 

But the immediate reference which the apostle 
gives to the text is to the life of Christ's followers. 
And we may divide it, in this application, and con- 
sider separately, for a time, the two propositions it 
contains. 

1. "Christ is all." You remember that brief but 
sublime title by which the Lord announced himself to 
the Israelites, — "I AM." That title stood to them 
as a promissory blank, to be filled up by them with 
the name of whatever attributes or grace they de- 
sired God to display in their behalf. It was as if God 
had said to them, Behold, ye doubters and trem- 
blers. See and adore the riches of my power, the 
fulness of my nature. Whatever ye would seek in 
me — I AM. Do ye need mercy? — I AM mercy. 
Do ye desire goodness? — I AM goodness. Do ye 
long for peace ? — that I AM. Do ye need forgive- 
ness ?— I AM that. Would ye have life? — I AM 
life. Whatever ye wish for or would expect in me 
or from me, write it, by your faith, in this blank 
deed of gift, and ye will find that whatever ye may 
worthily ask — that I AM. 

You will notice the same rich suggestiveness, and 
implication of meaning, in the text, " Christ is all,'' 
as if this too were a blank covenant of promise to 
the faithful disciple, a blank which he might fill up 
with any grace or any blessing, and presenting it, by 
his prayer, in the chancery of heaven, be sure of its 
acceptance by Christ. 



THE FULNESS OF CHRIST. 353 

Is the christian in trouble, " Christ is " peace. 
Is he tempted, " Christ is " strength. Is he af- 
flicted, "Christ is " comfort. Is he perplexed, " Christ 
is " wisdom. Is he beset with sin, " Christ is " 
sanctification. Is he descending into the valley 
of death, " Christ is " a Friend that sticketh closer 
than a brother, a strong rod and beautiful staff, 
and he need fear no evil. Whatever the soul may 
desire, whatever its necessities may call for, it has 
but to seize this accredited covenant in blank, and 
write its prayer there, with perfect confidence of 
assurance that " Christ is all," all that we need, all 
that we could desire, all that we have the capacity 
to receive or enjoy. 

" Thou art all goodness, 

Thou art all kindness, 
Tenderly leading 

Us in our blindness. 
We are but weakness, 

Thou art all power, 
Feebly, yet trustingly, 

Bide we the hour. 
Under the cloud we, 

Or under the sun, 
Looking to thee, say — 

' Thy will be done! ' 

" What though the thorns pierce 

Our feet as they go? 
Thou dost our path see, 

Our sufferings know. 
Never a sorrow 

Nor ever a tear, 
Thy eye seeth not — 

Why then should we fear? 



354 THE FULNESS OF CHRIST. 

" We who are living 

Within thy caress, 
Need not implore thee 

To keep or to hless. 
Evermore will we, 

With look fixed above, 
Trust in thy goodness 

And rest in thy love. " 

But more particularly we may give emphasis to 
the fact that Christ is all to the faith of his disciples. 
The old Greeks, iu the early days of Christianity, — 
men that boasted of the subtilties of Platonic love, — - 
saw in the humble followers of Jesus proofs of a love 
that transcended their philosophical ideas as far as 
these went beyond the selfish affections of common 
humanity, and they could not repress an exclamation 
of astonishment at the mighty magnetism which held 
the christians fast, by all the bonds of reverence and 
affection, to the name of their departed Lord. But 
the old Greeks failed to guess the secret of this power 
in the name of Jesus. They thought it the name 
only of a dead man, whereas it is the name of the 
living God. They looked upon Jesus as an absent 
teacher, forever silenced by the interdict of death, 
whereas he is a present and animating personality. 
They thought his name only a beloved memory to his 
disciples, but it is a cherished and inspiring presence 
among them. Here lies the secret of the power which 
displays itself in the affections and emotions of the 
christian. Christ still lives and speaks, he still 
teaches in his school, he still kuocks at the door of 
his friends and enters " and sups with them and they 
with him." • 



THE FULNESS OF CHRIST. 355 

No wonder a faith that treats the Saviour as a 
scholar treats the great names of learning, that 
places him just where it places Socrates or Aristotle 
or Plato, no wonder such faith makes no preten- 
sion to regenerating power and denies the need of a 
change of heart ; it is as helpless and useless in the 
great tumults of a convicted soul as a skeleton would 
be in the hour of battle. All the offices of religion 
point to Christ ; all the necessities of man point to 
him. He atones for our sin. He forgives sin. His 
Spirit subdues sin in us and develops all the fruits of 
sanctification. " He is the author and the finisher of 
faith." He is the embodiment of all the forces of his 
religion. He is the vital centre from which stream all 
the rays of doctrine. In everything but sin, he is 
all that we are and all that we can ever aspire to 
become. 

The objects of faith are concreted and realized in 
his person and character. He is "the truth, the way, 
and the life," — the truth we believe in, the way we 
are travelling, the life into which we are growing. 
He is our faith incarnated and personified. "Christ 
is all." In the second place, Christ is all to the hope 
of his disciples. Hope is begotton of faith and love, 
it is faith and love translated from the past and pres- 
ent to the future ; and Christ, who is all to faith, 
which looks backward to the past, and to the love 
which seizes and enjoys the present, is likewise all to 
hope, which looks forward to the future, and antici- 
pates the celestial kingdom of Grod. Our faith and 
hope so articulate into each other, their natures so em- 



356 THE FULNESS OF CHRIST. 

brace and interpenetrate, that they are true measures 
and tests of each other, in degree and in character. 
If our faith is weak and wayward and rambling, so 
will be our hope. But if our faith is strong and 
constant, and centred in Christ, our hope will be 
clear and definite ; and it will point to Christ in the 
future, as surely as the needle to the pole. No won- 
der that a faith which rejects Christ begets a hope of 
heaven as selfish as the covetous soul tempted and 
lured by a bribe. The disciples of such a faith see 
nothing in heaven but its rewards. They nourish a 
spiritual ambition for the honors that are to be 
worn and a spiritual avarice for the pleasures that are 
to be enjoyed hereafter. They are working for hire, 
they are impelled to duty by the hope of receiving 
wages. Not the love of Christ, but the prospect of 
happiness, this is the spur and goad that urges them 
on. How unlike is the hope of the real christian, 
a hope that throbs with the love and anticipation of 
Christ, a hope that is only the natural and sponta- 
neous efflorescence of faith in the Saviour ! The 
apostle, every fibre of whose nature quivered with 
love for his Master, gave voice to the unselfishness 
of the christian's hope, crying, "For me to live is 
Christ, and to die is gain." Wherefore was it gain 
to him ? "I desire to be with Christ, which is far bet- 
ter." Take the Saviour from his place among the 
constellated glories of heaven, and to his disciples' 
vision those glories would be extinguished in gloom. 
Take him from that feast at which all the elect of 
God will sit down to drink of the " new cup " which his 



THE FULNESS OF CHRIST. 357 

hand is to fill with the wine of a heavenly and ever- 
lasting vintage, take him away, and the pleasures of 
that feast would be turned to grief and mourning. 
He, he is the One our souls long to behold. Those 
hands through which the spikes were driven, that 
brow w 7 hich was lacerated with thorns and stained 
with purple drops, which was stained with awful 
drops of bloody sweat and agony, those eyes that 
never looked on man but with tenderness and sympa- 
thy, and that shed the tears of grieved mercy over 
the fate of Jerusalem, I ask the heart of any chris- 
tian if heaven offers, in all its wide domain, a more 
blessed vision than this of the Son of God. Oh, if 
the saints can shed tears, it seems to me the streets 
of heaven must run rivers of tears, tears of ineffa- 
ble and now inconceivable joy, when all who love 
Jesus shall \>q summoned to his presence, and stand- 
ing before him and thrilled with the sight of him, 
shall hear his voice, " Come, ye blessed of my 
Father ! » 

We now hasten to consider the force of the last 
clause, " Christ is all and in all." He is in all, first 
as respects his purposes concerning us. This truth 
presents and magnifies the tender and unsleeping 
care which the Saviour exercises over his disciples. 
It presents him as watching us, disciplining us, edu- 
cating us, by all the circumstances and occurrences 
of our lives. It shows us that there is no chance in 
our history, and no real accidents. It reveals the 
close bond of fellowship that connects us with Christ, 
a fellowship that takes in every event, and assures 

15* 



858 THE FULNESS OF CHRIST. 

us of the presence of the divine hand in all our af- 
fairs. Christ is in all that concerns us and all that 
happens to us. He is in our joy and in our grief, in 
our prosperity and in our adversity, in our health 
and in our sickness, in our trials, in our labors, in 
our afflictions, in our life, in our death ; Christ is in 
all. If we can draw no joyous assurance from the 
reflection that by this truth everything that enters 
into our history, every event that affects our life, is 
an expression of Christ's love for us ; that it shows 
his hand, weaving with us the web of our destiny, — 
if we be not comforted by this truth, which imprints 
our whole life with the characters of Jesus' love, and 
covers the world with the glowing symbols of his 
presence, it must be because Christ is not all in our 
faith, because we have not yet apprehended him as 
the great worship of our hearts. And this leads us 
finally to the truth that " Christ is in all," in the pur- 
poses of his followers. This is the truth that fitly con- 
cludes the other, a truth which Paul has expressed in 
other language, " If ye then be risen with Christ, seek 
those things which are above, where Christ sitteth at 
the right hand of God," which is equivalent to say- 
ing, M If ye have received a new life from Christ, let 
that life perpetually grow and lead you toward Christ, 
let that which has begun in Christ be finished in 
him." To make Christ the object of all our desires, 
to set him as the cynosure of our eyes, the scope of 
all our labors, to make life one great testimony of 
him and one enduring aspiration for him, — this is 
to show that we have learned the meaning and the 



THE FULNESS OF CHRIST. 359 

power of faith, that we have "comprehended the 
length, and breadth, and height, and depth, and 
known the love of Christ which passeth knowledge " ; 
this is to show that we do "love him, because he 
first loved us." Our life, my brethren, must and 
will interpret oui* faith. If Jesus is to us but a name, 
we shall be his disciples only in name. Oh, what a 
feeble, sickly, inapprehensive faith prevails among us ! 
We are christians ; but where is the Spirit of 
Christ that ought to make our lives "living epis- 
tles, known and read of all men"? We are chris- 
tians ; but where is the power that makes a chris- 
tian's arm a lever among men ? — a lever fit to move 
the world, because the strength of Christ is in it. 
Read our histories, they are written in the lan- 
guage of the world, they tell enough of pride and 
passion, and ambition and avarice, but how little 
they tell of Christ ! Evidently Christ is not all to 
us, and therefore he is not in all we do. There are 
too many corners of our hearts into which Christ en- 
ters not. There are too many chambers given up to 
the entertainment of Mammon. We are walking in 
ways where Christ does not and cannot walk with us. 
The true christian even loves his brother because he 
sees in him the marks of Jesus. He loves the chris- 
tian church because Christ is in it. Yet we turn from 
our brethren, not because Christ is not in them, we 
leave the church, we neglect the table of the Lord, not 
because Christ is not there, but because Christ is not 
in us. I would adjure you, by the fearful thoughts 
of that time when Christ will be all that can defend 



360 THE FULNESS OF CHRIST. 

or save you, to make Christ all to you now, while 
you may. Christian or unbeliever, no matter which 
you be, you would give up your hold on the king- 
doms of the universe to secure a hold on the mercy 
of the Saviour ! 



PAUL AND SILAS PRAYING IN PRISON. 



Acts xvi, 25, 26. 



This narrative discloses some of the modes, some 
of the conditions, and some of the wonderful effects 
of the divine power. It must have seemed, in that 
age, a very strange thing that men should carry the 
spirit of song into a prison, and light up its murky 
walls with the radiance of unabated cheerfulness ; and 
still stranger that they should be enabled to do this, 
not by any rare gift of temper, not by some gleam of 
unexpected good fortune, but by the rich graces of 
religion. 

Philosophy might have kept the apostles in serene 
patience and courageous fortitude ; but when did 
philosophy ever leap from the brain to the tongue in 
a spring of irrepressible thankfulness ? A mere sense 
of innocence might have comforted itself with prayer ; 
but when did suffering innocence ever add wing to 
its panoply, and soar to heaven in a flight of praise ? 

No wonder the prisoners in the wards of that Phi- 
lippian gaol listened and heard the apostles. There 
was something there worth more than sleep, and the 
novelty alone was enough to keep every head from 
the floor and every ear open. For consider the cir- 



362 PAUL AND SILAS PRAYING IN PRISON. 

cumstances in which the apostles gave that testimony 
to the spirit which was in them. They were smart- 
ing from the stripes which had been laid upon them. 
Their stiffened limbs were chafing against the stocks, 
and aching with the load of rusty chains. They had 
borne a day's brutal indignities, and they knew not 
but these were the precursors and the foretaste of 
worse sufferings to come. Yet they forgot their pains, 
they did not look at the shadows of the future, they 
did not feel the metal that clanked on their limbs ; 
the body was straitened, but the soul was free, there 
were no stocks for that, and the love of Jesus was an 
anodyne even for bodily pangs, a sweet cordial, 
which no prison-taint could poison, and their voices 
went up as clearly and as resonantly as if they had 
been still with Lydia on the bank of the river. This 
is why we are told " the prisoners heard them." 

Luke wishes us to understand that they did not pray 
like men full of fear and apprehension, with whis- 
pered accents and trembling voices. I believe myself 
that when men pray with joyful vigor they speak out 
in good, round, elastic tones, just as they talk when 
they are in earnest. When we carry a petition up to 
God, we like to do it in English, so that we may 
understand it ourselves, not that God cannot under- 
stand it in any other language, spoken or unspoken ; 
and just so, when we have a real christian joy in our 
hearts, our hearts like to hear it bursting like an 
anthem from our lips, and spreading itself out in 
energetic speech. A silent christian is nothing but 
the title of a good song, all the music left out of it ; 



PAUL AND SILAS PRAYING IN PRISON. 3G3 

and a christian who cannot pray so that others may 
hear him, does but hum an air that rises from his 
throat ; if it came from his heart it would pour itself 
out, like the song of the lark soaring to heaven's 
gate. 

Religion has no power in us and exerts no power 
through us if it is not a religion of joy. \\ hen the 
tank is full, the water will overflow, and joy is the 
overflow of the heart. You can turn the hands of a 
watch with a watch-key, but you cannot keep time in 
that way ; the watch wants a main- spring. 

Now, conscience is only the watch-key of religion, 
but the main-spring is- a hearty joy in the love and 
service of Christ. Duties are only the branches of 
our spiritual life, but joy is the green leaves. We must 
have the branches, or we have nothing to hang the 
leaves on, but the best evidence we can have that the 
tree is alive is to see it putting on foliage ; and when 
we behold a christian really enjoying his religion, we 
have good evidence that his religion is full of sap and 
vigor. And to enjoy religion, it must be growing 
within us. We cannot carry the same quantity of it 
through life, we must add to it, or we must take from 
it. Trying to content ourselves with the same expe- 
rience of God's grace w 7 hich we had when we entered 
into the kingdom, is like living in a closed room, and 
breathing over and over again the same old atmos- 
phere. Christians grow consumptive by breathing 
over the same old spiritual atmosphere. They need 
more oxygen ; they want exhilarating ; they ought to 
take their religion into the open air, and give it more 



364 PAUL AND SILAS PRAYING IN PRISON. 

exercise, till its pulses beat with joy and its dry 
bones fill themselves with the marrow of gladness. 
Consider again, "They prayed and sang praises 
unto God," literally, "praying, they hymned God." 
The praise was in the praying, the hymn was a part 
of the prayer. It was a joyful prayer, and a prayerful 
hymn, a union which proclaims the true christian 
chemistry ; for prayer without praise is meat without 
drink, and praise without prayer is drink without 
meat. A dry religion may go through life praying, 
without a thrill of that joy which makes melody in 
the heart ; a sense of our necessities may drive us to 
prayer, while no sense of God's love stirs us to 
thankfulness. Then we are like a reed instrument 
without a mouthpiece, or a flute without stops ; our 
religion has no expression, and it is little more than a 
monotone. It is no high proof of our devotion that 
we can pray in a time of great need. When suffer- 
ings bear hard upon us and crosses are laid on our 
shoulders till we sink to the ground ; when there is 
no human help for us and all love is impotent but the 
love of Jesus, then, if we are christians at all, we 
must pray, we must throw ourselves at the foot of the 
altar and cry for deliverance. We may have grace 
enough to do that, grace enough to utter the prayer 
of passive resignation, and yet we may not have 
grace enough to dry our tears or turn our sighs into 
a gush of thanksgiving. We may say, " I will bear 
the indignation of the Lord, because I have sinned 
against him," while our hearts are too cold to say, 
"The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away ; blessed be 



PAUL AND SILAS PRAYING IN PRISON. 365 

the name of the Lord." The prodigal was glad to get 
husks, though there was plenty of bread waiting for 
him in his father's house ; and a christian may live 
on husks, and just live, salting them with his tears 
and growing leaner and gaunter day by day, till 
he shivers in every blast of the storm, and wraps his 
misery about him like a cloak. 

w Why should the children of a king go mourning 
all their days ? " They would not if they lived more 
with their elder brother. It is the presence of Christ 
that cheers the suffering disciple. Job put on sack- 
cloth, and sat down in ashes, and bewailed himself. 
Paul and Silas put on scars and bruises, and sat 
down in chains ; but they sang praises unto God. 

Prayer and praise are the two hands of the chris- 
tian soul, and they ought to clasp each other before 
God. If you cannot pray, you cannot sing, as a 
christian ought to sing, with all the stops of his heart 
open, and joy gushing out in a river of music. And 
till a christian can sing the unwritten score of such 
music as this, and his faith and hope rejoice and grow 
glad within him, he can only half pray. He may 
toil up the hillside, but he does not mount up with 
wings as an eagle. Life is only a supplication for 
him, it has no great hymn in it. He may know the 
power of Jesus' love, but the joy of it is untasted. 
Prayer only carries us to Jesus, but joy keeps us 
with him, and in that company prayer and praise 
flow together like dewdrops, sorrow grows bright, 
suffering is comforted, and all things are gilded with 
the glad beam of heavenly hope and promise. 



36P) PAUL AND SILAS PRAYING IN PRISON. 

" I never hear good music," said an old worthy, " but 
I wish to pray ; for I think of the music that the 
saints are listening to in heaven, and I long to 
join in it; and that sets me to praying." So it is 
with every full-hearted disciple. Prayer is the stalk 
that hears up the flower of his joy. Take the 
juices out of that stalk and the flower withers and 
drops ; but show me the flower, and I will tell you 
whether there is much life in the stalk. 

Look now at the time when the apostles prayed 
and sang. It was "at midnight," an unusual time, 
we should say, for such an office ; but then it was an 
unusual place to pray in, and an unusual emergency 
that called for prayer, and perhaps the most unusual 
thing of all is that prayer should break out into 
praise at such an hour as that. One would think the 
apostles would have been weighed down with heavi- 
ness, exhausted with suffering, and sunk in slumber; 
but they had an antidote against weariness, and a 
charm against suffering, and a joy that broke the 
bands of sleep, and kept them awake to praise God 
that they had been " accounted worthy to suffer for 
the name of Jesus." 

They are the unusual hours that test the faith of a 
christian, and tell of what spirit he is. He may be 
able to keep awake on ordinary occasions, and yet 
fall asleep just when his opportunity and Grod's power 
are ready to bless his watchfulness. The spiritual 
life of many is like the tide that comes in only at 
certain fixed hours. The love of Jesus and the 
motive-power of religion seem to lie outside of them, 



PAUL AND SILAS PRAYING IN PRISON. 367 

and to reach them and stir them into action, as water 
from a mill-race turns the wheel, only when the gates 
are np. 

There are thousands of good day-christians whose 
zeal goes out at night when the light is blown out, 
and thousands who exult in the sunshine, but have no 
heart to sing or pray at midnight. But when the 
soul is full of love and joy, all seasons are alike to it 
and all places are alike. The darkness is as the day, 
the midnight glows like noon, a table is spread in 
the wilderness, flowers spring up in the desert, sleep 
is heralded with prayer and broken with praise ; and 
though the body may be racked with pains and the 
lips scorched with fever, faith looks up, like the pa- 
triarch from his stony couch, and sees the shining 
ladder and the ministering angels, and rejoices in the 
wondrous love of Him who keeps watch over the 
waker and "giveth his beloved sleep." 

Let us observe now what power attended, and what 
results followed, the praying and praising of the 
apostles. In those days men could be convinced only 
by sensible exhibitions of divine force. The soul 
was so sluggish that it needed something more than 
a spiritual jar to stir it into life, and all nature was 
jarred to start it out of its lethargy. We do not 
know just what the apostles prayed for, but we may 
be sure that they did not pray so much for their own 
deliverance as for the triumph of their cause in despite 
of their perils and through them. That is the kind 
of prayer God loves to answer. When a soul cries, 
"Not my will, but thine, be done," it is sure to find 



368 PAUL AND SILAS PRAYING IN PRISON. 

that God's will is the nearest and brightest road to its 
own best desires. There is power in such a prayer, 
for it is the spirit of Jesus himself praying and work- 
ing in us ; and while we pray, God is making ready to 
bear witness for us and to shake the moral elements 
if need be, as he shook the earth for the apostles : 
"For suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that 
the foundations of the prison were shaken, and 
immediately all the doors were opened and every 
one's bands were loosed." But the apostles did not 
try to escape. They knew the meaning of that 
mighty disturbance, and they knew that it was only 
a preparation for something greater and better. 
They heard the rumbling of the chariot-wheels, and 
they sat still and waited for the chariot itself. 

Here is another sign of the devout and unselfish 
spirit which had spoken in their prayer ; they did 
not think first of themselves, they trusted them- 
selves in God's hands and expected his mercy with- 
out attempting to hasten it. Their voice had been 
heard ; now they listened for God's voice in answer. 

Brethren, here is a lesson for us. Such is the 
bond between Jesus and his people, that their faith 
and prayer are necessary to the display of his power 
among men. It is not the wick that feeds the flame 
of the lamp, but what could the oil do without it? 
It is not the spark that blows the ball from the 
cannon, but what could we do with the cartridge 
if we had no means to fire it? 

Now prayer is the wick, and zeal is the spark that 
develops the light and the energy of God's truth. 



PAUL AND SILAS PRAYING IN PRISON. 369 

Lot the church wait on God, and God will wait on 
the church. The world may have put her in prison, 
she m\y have put herself there, as she often does, 
by her own sins, languishing in the chains of sloth, 
and with her feet in the stocks. But in the midnight 
of her distress, when half around her are asleep, let 
her only awake, and send up an imploring cry, and 
God will shake the walls of her prison, and strike off 
her fetters, and make her honorable before men. We 
must understand the fact that the all-conquering 
energy of the church is only the surplus vitality of 
the church, when she throws out in work the exuber- 
ance of her own muscular strength and rejoicing youth- 
fulness. It is not enough to sustain our own average 
tone, and keep up the normal blood-heat. You may 
make Avater boil at 212 degrees, but you cannot get 
up much steam at that temperature ; and you may 
keep the life of the church simmering and bubbling 
with a decent show of heat, and not get up expansive 
force enough to pass beyond the walls. And while 
this is the case, we are always thinkiug of ourselves. 
We are praying for our own deliverance, when we 
ought to be praying for others. We are lavishing 
sympathy on our needs, when our hearts should over- 
flow towards the unbelieving. We are so intent upon 
our own dangers that we forget past mercies, and 
leave praise out of our praying. But let us forget 
ourselves once, and think a little more of saving 
others, till our prayers rise from our hearts like 
smoke from burning incense ; let us make the prison 
walls ring with our pleadings, and the midnight 



370 PAUL AND SILAS PRAYING IN PRISON. 

sonorous with our songs, and we should find that 
world-quakes have not ceased yet to testify to the 
truth, though earthquakes have, and that when chris- 
tians beseech God to save sinners, sinners come ask- 
ing, "What shall we do to be saved?" 

I ask christian fathers and mothers if they have not 
sometimes been shaken out of their indolence by 
their anxiety for their own children, and felt the 
love of Jesus dearer to their own hearts, the more 
they saw that that alone could save their sons and 
daughters. They learned to pray better when they 
yearned over their children, and warmth came back 
to them as their souls struggled in prayer for those 
they loved. Wonderful is the working of this un- 
selfish thought for others, wonderful even in the 
experience and history of unconverted men. God's 
grace often opens a way to a man's heart through 
this tenderness of his nature and this ardent sympa- 
thy with the objects of his affection. There was a 
lawyer in New York, high in his profession, but a 
proud, somewhat cold, reserved, and cynical man, 
and utterly indifferent to religion. He had a son of 
fine promise, whom he had carefully educated, and 
whom he hoped to make the partner of his busi- 
ness. But in the circles which his father frequented 
the son learned to drink wine, and rapidly passed 
through all the degrees from a fashionable tippler to 
a confirmed drunkard. 

The father tried to save him by every means in his 
power ; and pierced with the anguish of his father 
and the shame of his friends, the son tried to save 



PAUL AND SILAS PRAYING IN PRISON. 371 

himself, but utterly in vain. He would struggle 
through a few months of soberness, and then fall 
again in a single hour of temptation. His father sent 
him to an institution for the cure of such unfortunates, 
but he came back only to fall lower than before. 
One night the son came home late, and found his 
father sitting by the table and hiding his face in 
his hands, as if afraid to look up and witness the 
degradation of his child. But the young man said, 
" Father, you need not be ashamed to look at me. I 
am sober to-night. I came upon a little tract to-day 
with this title, 'The Power of Jesus the only power 
that can save.' Father, that is the power I want. 
You have tried to save me, and I have tried to save 
myself, and my friends have all tried, and I feel now 
that I am lost, body and soul, if I do not find salva- 
tion in Christ." In the joy of his heart, the father 
exclaimed, "Oh, that I were a christian that I could 
help you, my son ! " And within a year, when the 
father saw his son, redeemed by the love of Christ, 
standing in his old places of honor, unshaken by 
temptation, and brave and stanch in his advocacy of 
the Name which had become his shield,, the father 
went to his son and said, " I see now that godliness 
has the promise of the life that now is and of that 
which is to come. I wish to claim that promise. 
What saved you can save me. How shall I find 
Jesus?" 

If this is the healing and saving power of tenderness 
for others in the hearts of the unconverted, how much 
more active and energetic it must be in the hearts of 



372 PAUL AND SILAS PRAYING IN PRISON. 

christians. The more love we give to others, the more 
love Jesus will give to us. If we stop our sympa- 
thies on the world-side, we stop them. on the side 
of heaven. 

But, my unconverted friends, do not believe that 
there are no christians praying while you sleep. You, 
like the jailer, may see nothing and know nothing of 
the vigilant love that turns night into day with its 
wakeful solicitude for you. Mothers may be praying 
for you, children may breathe your names in every 
petition they offer at the throne of grace, friends 
are remembering you, and longing for the day when 
they shall, with tearful and heartfelt gladness, hear 
from your lips the sinner's first prayer, " What shall 
I do to be saved ? " The moral air you live in is per- 
vaded with these sympathies of christian love, and 
you can but feel them. God grant they may become 
too powerful for you to slight them, that you may be 
shaken, like the jailer, by these tremblings of the 
air, and awake out of sleep to find in Jesus that only 
power which can save ! 



NOT BY MIGHT NOR BY POWER, BUT BY MY 
SPIRIT." 



1 ' The wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every 
man straight before him, and they took the city. — Joshua vi, 20. 

There is in this language a homely, straightforward 
directness and simplicity that make it one of the 
finest specimens of genuine old Saxon-English. So 
our great great, and several times more great-great- 
grandfathers and ancestors told the stories of their 
famous deeds, and recited how their fathers had come 
over from Dutchland and taken Britain and made it 
Angle-land. There is also in this language a bound 
of animation, a leaping spring of vigorous heartiness, 
as if the speaker were telling his tale for the first 
time to a crowd of eager listeners, and were anxious 
and impatient to crown their curiosity and put the 
climax to his own joy by coming to the triumphant 
end. He talks here, he does not preach, like a man 
who had just come out of the fight, and who stood 
wiping the perspiration from his forehead, while his 
tongue rattled out these small bullets of an evangel 
of victory. And is it not just so, whether the her- 
ald come with tidings of a material or of a moral con- 
flict, whether he be a soldier of men or a soldier of 
God, a captain of cohorts or a recruit .of the great 
Captain of our salvation ? If he has been in the bat- 

16 



374 "not by might nor by power, 

tie, and has struck a blow there that helped on the 
victory, does not the very spirit of the conflict rush 
into his speech, and the joy of his heart make his 
lips eloquent, and do we listen to any man more 
willingly than to such a story-teller as that? I have 
often wished I could have been in the assembly of 
Sparta when that breathless runner from Thermop- 
ylae told the memorable news of Spartan valor and de- 
votion on that unequalled field of strife, " They fought 
like heroes, they died like Spartans, they lie walled 
in and roofed over with the heaps they have slain." 
It would have been something to hear this tale from 
that old Spartan soldier. But I have had a wish 
tenfold stronger, and that is, that I could have heard 
one of the disciples preach on the day of Pentecost, 
or one of the first converts tell " what great things the 
Lord had done for him." For in those days the gos- 
pel was -tidings, glad tidings of great joy, and I have 
the belief that the gladness came out in the telling, 
and that the great joy of the news kindled up a rare 
power of persuasion in the speaker, and spread around 
a contagious enthusiasm in the listeners. The gospel 
has ceased to be news to us in its message, but is it 
not news to every converted sinner in its eflScacy, and 
does its gladness ever grow stale, or the joy of its 
experience wither under the tread of centuries? I 
believe in the greatness of this joy as an influence on 
impenitent men. I believe in the gladness of the 
gospel as an element of its power and success. We 
want this matchless story told by the tongues of men 
who have come fresh from the capture of the city, 



BUT BY MY SPIRIT." 375 

men whose hearts bear the record of what they affirm 
with their lips, and whose living earnestness is a 
pledge, as good as the scars of an old soldier, that 
they are telling the truth, and a truth which they 
hold the great pride and glory of their lives. 

We want the gospel preached once more over the 
land like a bulletin of victory, which the people 
will not wait to hear read out to them like a Fast- 
day proclamation, by some grave official, but once 
possessed of it, draw it out of the pulpits and the 
churches, take it up in their own mouths and publish 
it at every street-corner, throw it exultantly at every 
passer-by, and send it down every breeze and into 
every house, till the very air is filtered by it, and 
the daily food digested by it, and the merchant's pen 
moves to the music of it, and the workman's hammer 
rings with the joy of it, and it is absorbed into all 
the arteries of our manifold life. Cannot this be 
done for the gospel? Was there ever a grander 
message, was there ever another victory, or can 
there be, like that of the cross? The Spartans 
died, but Greece was not saved. Jesus died, and 
the whole world is ransomed. Do you furnish the 
men to tell this news right from their own hearts, 
and there are sin and misery enough to furnish them 
with listeners. 

But let us take up the text, and simply follow out 
its several averments, and apply to ourselves, as chris- 
tians, those points of apposite suggestion which we may 
discover in them. In the first place, there was the city 
to be taken. It was a strong city, with a good, mas- 



376 "not by might nor by power, 

sive wall, well defended with towers and well manned 
with a determined enemy. The people needed pretty 
strong assurance, a pretty large faith, to undertake a 
task such as the conquest of Jericho. They knew 
nothing of the art of besieging a walled town ; they 
had no artillery such as the Egyptians used, and no 
means to provide any ; and without the aid of batter- 
ing-rams and machines for throwing stones, what 
could they hope to accomplish? A walled town in 
those days could and did sometimes hold out, even 
against a tolerably well-provided army, for years in 
succession, and I suppose the inhabitants of Jeri- 
cho fairly laughed at the attempt to capture their 
strong city by a demonstration little better than a mere 
show of hands, and I have no doubt that there were 
men in the camp of Israel who shook their heads 
sagely, and muttered their carping discussions at the 
proposals of Joshua. They would have liked to go 
round the city and neutralize it with a corps of ob- 
servation. But there it lay, just where Joshua had 
God's command to march, and he felt it necessary 
to march right through it, or over it ; and he set his 
foot down, and when he took it up, behold, he was in 
Jericho ! 

Now, my christian friends, there is just such a city 
before us to-day, relatively as strong, and, to all hu- 
man means, just as hard to conquer. That city is the 
Christless world. It lies between us and the last tri- 
umphs of our cause and Master. It is our business to 
take it, by the help of God, and we shall take it, 
with the same invisible artillery that overthrew Jeri- 



BUT BY MY SPIRIT." 377 

cho. But does it not try our faith to look up at 
those frowning walls and see that host of enemies, 
and then feel how impotent our own efforts must 
be without perfect confidence in God's invisible artil- 
lery? "Not by might nor by strength, but by my 
Spirit, saith the Lord." That is our hope, that is our 
security. But have we not some who both feel and 
use the language of discouragement because they 
measure the difficulty by the paucity of human means 
to overcome it? They stand, as some of the Israel- 
'tes did, over against some particularly strong tower 
of the walls, and they look so much and so exclusively 
at that, that they come to think nothing can be done 
so long as that tower stands there with its threatening 
battlements. 

Do we not all have these specialties of ours, — with 
some, it may be, the conversion of a child or a friend 
or a neighbor, — and do we not grow easily to believe 
that while our particular tower remains unattached and 
frowning down upon us, God cannot be doing very 
much for us, and so we become distrustful and dispir- 
ited? But God is doing something elsewhere. Other 
towers are being stormed and battered down if ours 
is not. The host is advancing, if we are stationary, 
and the city will be taken, and over its tumbling walls 
the faithful will march in " with gladness and ever- 
lasting joy upon their heads." 

But let us now consider how the people made ready 
to take the city. The tactics are peculiar, and deserve 
attention. Of course Joshua knew that the main 
thing was to carry out orders ; he knew where the 



378 "not by might nor by power, 

strength lay. This was to be au unanswerable demon- 
stration of the power of God's presence with his 
people and his people's trust in him. Yet see how 
wisely and significantly Joshua blends prudence with 
his faith. He sends forward the ark of the Lord, 
the palladium of the host, with its attendant priests, 
but he takes care to marshal before it the armed men 
and to draw up behind it a rearward of chosen troops. 
That is always the manner in which Almighty Power 
consents to do its best and most for men. Let men 
do the best they can for themselves first, and then call 
on God to help them, and God will not fail them. It 
is no sign of courage in a soldier to thrust himself 
unarmed on an enemy ; it is a flagrant proof of folly. 
God will not lift up a cowardly arm, or give strength 
to a rash arm ; but let a man raise his arm to smite 
in the name of the Lord, and let him wield the trust- 
iest blade he can command, and his blow will come 
down with a crash that mere unaided human sinews 
never made, and his sword will cleave with a flash as 
if the heaven had opened to give him light for his 
work. The people of God want faith, but they want 
also a good vanguard of armed men. They must 
send on the ark before them, but they must follow it 
up closely with a compact rearward ; and while their 
hearts throb with expectation of what God is to do 
for them, they must keep up a steady, unfaltering 
march, close all gaps in the lines, and be ready to do 
the mere man's part of the work with a man's cour- 
age, patience, and persistence. 

But there is one direction given by Joshua which 



BUT BY MY SPIRIT." 379 

we ought not to pass lightly l>y. He tells them to 
make no vociferous noise till he give them special 
permission. He did not make this prohibition from 
the desire of concealing the movement. That move- 
ment was all open to the enemy, and besides, the 
trumpets were to blow, and that was enough to betray 
the advance. 

But it was in keeping with the spirit of the un- 
dertaking that the lips of the people should be 
quiet, and that the solemn grandeur of the enter- 
prise should be disturbed by no tumult of tongues. 
Noise is costly ; it takes the sword out of the hand, 
and twists the tongue into the hilt ; it uses up energy 
which can be better displayed in some other way, and 
it is impossible to superintend a good shout and a 
good stroke at the same time. Brooks may babble, 
but the Mle runs still ; and the busier the heart is, the 
more sparing of speech is the tongue. Silently, save 
for the trumpets, silently, but with firm and steady 
tramp, for six days, the people marched round the 
city, once a day ; and how the enemy, standing on 
his walls, and looking down on that pageant of a 
choral siege, on those files of sober-visaged and appar- 
ently tongue-tied men, as they circled slowly around 
day after day, how the enemy must have jibed and 
sneered ! They did not come near enough to be shot 
at ; but how he must have thrown at them his quiver- 
fuls of taunts and railleries, and laughed at what he 
regarded as the most stupendous folly in the whole 
history of sieges ! In those days great account was 
made of the gift of boasting and invective, and the 



380 



old nations had educated these gifts to a pitch of per- 
fection that would bear a comparison with our own 
attainments in this department ; and how the enemy 
must have amused himself at the silence of Israel, 
and comforted his fears with the conclusion that there 
was not much danger to be apprehended from a peo- 
ple that had so little to say for themselves ! 

My friends, do we not sometimes fall into this mis- 
take, and grow sceptical concerning the silent majes- 
ties and powers of God's truth and Christ's church ? 
Are we not foolish enough to think that noise is sub- 
stance, and that the most valor lies where the loudest 
shouting is heard ? But it is not so ; there is power 
in a sleeping volcano, and there is momentum in a 
softly sliding avalanche, and you hear no great sound 
from either, till it has gathered well up its immeas- 
urable forces, and sent them hurtling into the sky 
or down the slope of the mountain. This is all na- 
ture, but human nature. The noise awakes when the 
work is done; the air is rent with tremors and the 
earth heaves with palpitations when the explosion 
comes. And I believe that human nature does best 
when she follows general nature. 

Let me not be misunderstood. I am not entering 
a caveat against the free ebullition of fine animal 
spirits, swept, like the strings of a harp, by the half- 
playful hand of a sudden joy. I am not protesting 
against the spontaneous abandon with which the heart 
throws itself upon the tongue, and asks it to help 
it work off the surplus energy of an unbounded de- 
light. It is a law of our nature that when we have 



BUT BY MY SPIRIT." 381 

any great access of nervous force, the overflow is sure 
to seek the most usual channels, and to pass off in 
that way ; and as the tongue is apt to prove as busy 
a vehicle for men or women as anv other or^an, it is 
perfectly natural that a vigorous feeling should rush 
out upon the tongue, and that any unusual happiness 
should set into energetic action the organs of speech. 
No, let us not barricade the gateway against a genu- 
ine joy, even in religion. Let us not square our 
faces because we are in church, and screw our muscles 
into sanctimonious primness, and flatten our voices 
down to a minor key, and go about God's service as 
as if our religion were a sleeping invalid and we were 
afraid to waken her. But it is noise we protest 
against, in church or out of it ; sound that has no 
sense in it, for noise is not expression, and so has 
nothing to justify it; and in religion a mere noise 
that goes no deeper than the throat, while it rises and 
roars among the rafters, and threatens to turn the 
vane on the church-steeple, as if it were a spiritual 
northwester, that, I apprehend, is just the sort of 
noise that Joshua forbade, and it is a sort that the 
church can well afford to dispense with. I have heard 
christians pray and talk with deafening loudness, so 
that the very windows clattered, but I could bear it 
right heartily, for I knew it was not noise but voice ; 
it was an expression, and inside the tempest of sound, 
there was an axis of living earnestness and vital sin- 
cerity. That was the sound Dr. Chalmers used to 
make when, as the Scotch said of him, he "gar'd the 
roof roar, and set the lums shaking." But I have 

16* 



382 "not by might nor by power, 

heard the same stentorian notes when it seemed evi- 
dent that they were the gist of the whole matter, and 
that the man was doing his religion on the same prin- 
ciple upon which some of the Buddhists do their 
prayers, they tack them, all written out, on the cir- 
cumference of a little water-wheel, and then fix the 
wheel in the current of a stream and set it turning, 
and the more noise it makes the better ; and I should 
certainly hope that we might have as few of these 
human praying-wheels in the church as possible. 
But if your heart be full, then let it gush over. If 
there actually be a Niagara of power in you, no one 
will object to the sound of it. Have something to 
base your utterance upon, and then let it rise, if you 
please, to the top of the spire. 

Do your work, and then shout ; spare your lungs 
till you have something besides air to rest your 
strength on ; seize the prize first, and then you may 
turn your rejoicing powers to the acclamations of vic- 
tory. This is what Joshua did. He was only hold- 
ing the people back. It must have been a hard trial 
for their faith, and no doubt it gave great opportuni- 
ties to all the grumblers among them, and brought out 
the sinister forebodings and cavilling ill-nature of all 
the constitutional fault-finders in the camp ; and when 
the sixth day had passed with no change in the situa- 
tion, these captious spirits must have had great facil- 
ity in making proselytes. 

But the seventh day came, and on this day the work 

was seven-fold hard, for the host marched seven times 

ound the city, and then Joshua took the bridle from 



383 

their tongues, he let loose the long-pent-up fervors of 
anticipation, and, as if challenging faith to do its ut- 
most, he gave the command to shout. And it was a 
challenge to faith, and a very exacting demand upon 
it. For what was there to shout for ? No doubt 
some of the people raised their eyes towards the city 
walls and asked this question in their own hearts, 
" What shall we shout for ? What have we accom- 
plished?" They had really accomplished a great 
deal, and they were about to reap the fruit of it, only 
they did not know it. And is it not just so now with 
mo?t of our work? Do we not go through six days 
of wearisome toil without a sign of success, and 
almost despair, till, on the last hour of the seventh 
day, God brings out into shining exhibition all the 
results we have been unconsciously accumulating? 
The great body of the people had faith. They had 
kept silent through faith. They had plodded round 
the city in faith. They believed that God was about 
to do some great thing for them. And when the 
order came to set up a shout, they did not doubt there 
was something to shout for, and they lifted up their 
voices with a will as resolute as that which had kept 
them so steadfast to the drudgery of their daily march 
about the city ; and there was so much heartiness in 
that shout, it was such a relief to the suppressed feel- 
ings of the last six days, it was such a joyful defiance 
to their enemy, that I believe it was as sonorous a 
shout as men ever gave, and the spirit of it so infec- 
tious that even the grumblers and dissentients must 
have joined in it. The enemy, hearing that shout, 



384 "not Br might nor by power, 

must have been thunder-struck ; that silent people 
had found their tongues at last. Those dull, sober 
travellers in a circle must have caught a new inspira- 
tion, a frenzy of confidence, an afflatus of divine 
enthusiasm, and that shout boded no good to the 
city ; and the enemy dropped his bow, ceased his 
jesting, and grew pale and began to tremble. And 
well he might. There was a power at work that no 
walls could withstand, and the walls tottered and 
cracked. Without engines, without artillery, that 
encircling host were sapping the foundations of bas- 
tion and curtain. That shout went through the stones 
like the iron hail of a broadside. The mighty arm 
that was greeted by that shout, and was seen by the 
faith of the people, came down upon tower and but- 
tress and crushed them to the earth ; and as that cry 
swept like a volley of thunder over the doomed city 
and rolled away over the plain, behold, "the wall fell 
flat," and one lii.tle moment, the twinkling of an 
eye, showed to exulting Israel the reward of seven 
days of labor and fatigue. The unseen became the 
visible, and they knew then that every step they had 
taken had been leading towards this splendid con- 
summation. 

I wish, my brethren, we might have and hold the 
same faith in the final success of every good work. 
I wish w T e might cheerfully and patiently wait and 
labor through the seven days of our preparation, 
rather of God's preparation, without a doubt that in 
the end the invisible will for us be made manifest, 
and we shall see that every step has carried us toward 



385 

victory, every circuit of duty has couutecl one in the 
aggregate of achievements, and that we, too, if we 
hold out with resolution, will have leave to raise our 
shout and to strike up our choral song of triumph. 

And now I will ask you to consider how the people 
entered into the city, so that the people went up into 
the city, " every man straight before him." What a 
secret of success do these units of our tongue reveal, 
" every man," etc. That is the way in which many 
a great battle has been fought and won. That is the 
way in which Dessaix, with his seasoned troops, 
turned the tide of battle at Marengo, and drove back 
the conquering Austrians. That is the way in which 
Washington taught our fathers to beat the Hessians 
at Trenton, and take the city, tr Fix bayonets, and 
charge, every man straight before him!" That is 
the spirit and that is the one irresistible manoeuvre of 
a great army ; every man goes forward on his own 
line, and under his own impulse, but all the lines 
converge to the same point, and the impulse is uni- 
versal. No wonder they took the city. They swept 
over it as the concentric rings of the maelstrom close 
over the devoted ship which has entered it. They 
poured in from all quarters, like quicksand over a 
sinking animal, and at every step their numbers 
seemed to grow, because the circle was smaller, till 
shoulder piopped shoulder, shield was locked with 
shield, and blow seconded blow, and like a tornado 
they wheeled upon the city and wrenched it from the 
earth, and their shout of victory became the dirge of 
a kingdom and a people. And this is the secret of 



386 



christian success, "every man straight before him." 
Let no christian hinge his movements on those of an- 
other. Let no one turn out for a little uneven ness in 
his path, or for some rugged obstruction. Let no 
one look around indolently to see what his neighbor 
is doing, or give up his own task because others are 
forgetting their tasks, and sit down because they aie 
lagging behind. God has drawn a straight line of 
travel for every one of us, and it leads us into the 
city. Our shout may have died away. The flush of 
joyful eagerness may have faded out. But there 
remain for us conquering faith, and its splendid re- 
wards. Look down at your own feet, there lies your 
next duty. Look directly before you, there God is 
calling you, and marshalling the way. Take up the 
very nearest duty. Let down the next step. Keep 
your eye on the mark, and keep that mark enlarging 
with every footfall. 

O church of Christ, encompass the city ! O sol- 
diers of Christ, march on to take it, " every man 
straight before him " ! 



CHRISTIAN WARFARE. 



" I have fought a good fight." — 2 Tim. iv, 7. 

Here the apostle, I suppose with no distinct 
intention to do so, draws the outlines of the best 
and noblest character. By three rapid yet skilful 
strokes he puts before us three of the highest vir- 
tues, or rather three of the divinest constellations of 
virtue, possible to man, while he combines these 
three clusters or virtues in a single portrait. I once 
saw a painting designed on some such plan ; it pre- 
sented, to a near inspection, a great number of 
portraits, said to be veritable likenesses, which all 
blended, at a greater distance, in the likeness of 
the distinguished man, whose aids, counsellors, and 
friends were represented by the smaller portraits. 

It generally requires many persons to make up a 
masterly portrait. Not often does the artist find all 
he wants in a single model ; he takes the nose of 
one, the eyes of another, the arm and hand of a third, 
and out of fragmentary perfections he makes a per- 
fect whole. And still more rarely can you make up 
a complete character from the virtues of any one 
man, and that, not because we are so much wanting 
in virtue, or in particular virtues, but because we 



388 CHRISTIAN WARFARE. 

are so little harmonious, so ill-balanced, and often so 
intemperate even in our best qualities. A fruit-tree 
is good for little unless it bear fruit ; but a tree may 
carry such a load of fruit that it can bring none of it 
to mellow ripeness. There is a pathology of the 
virtues, and a hygiene of the christian graces. Too 
much heat tends to rottenness, and over-cultivation 
gives you buTk at the expense of sweetness. 

The same rule wdl not apply to our intellectual 
and our moral powers. It may be wise in a man to 
take most pains in educating those mental faculties 
which he has in Highest degree ; but we do not train 
our moral powers for the sake of utility, and there- 
fore anything like partiality for special virtues is a 
negative vice : it is pushing a part of yourself so near 
the light that all the rest of you lies in shadow ; it is 
an ungraceful moral obesity ; it is nothing more than 
selfishness with the carnal stains washed off and the 
wrinkles smoothed away with consecrated oil. 

But the truth is, you cannot cultivate the virtues 
in isolation, apart from and independently of one 
another, and therefore you cannot raise a great 
character from a single quality, any more than you 
can make a wagon-wheel with only one spoke in it. 
It takes a great many heads of wheat to make a 
bushel of grain, and that farmer would be a fool who 
should attempt or expect to get his bushel of grain 
from one large head. The one true aim of culture is 
virtue, not the virtues, grace, not the graces, the 
central force that radiates to the very rim of your 
life, the sound, vital heart-beat that creates a pulse in 



CHRISTIAN WARFARE. 389 

every artery, and gives vigor to every function and 
every motion. 

We can see in Paul's character, as he has drawn it, 
how the great qualities played into, ministered to, 
and sustained one another, and by their union, pro- 
duced that breadth and largeness, and that intensity 
also, which make his character one of the ideals of the 
christian church. 

I have seen a comment on the text which asserted 
that its metaphors are mixed; but this is incorrect. 
The implied allusions are all of the same kind, and 
the one in the first clause, "I have fought a good 
fight," is not a military, but like the references in 
the second and the third clauses, is a gymnastic or 
agonistic metaphor, an allusion to the games so 
common in the old world, and so familiar to Paul 
and to all his correspondents and hearers. The 
"fight "is not a battle, but an Olympic or athletic 
contest, or perhaps a gladiatorial struggle in the 
arena ; but the idea in the apostle's mind is made 
perfectly definite and obvious by the epithet "good," 
and by the use of the definite article ; for the trans- 
lation should run, "I have fought the good fight." 

There is not a doubt that the "good fis:ht " is Paul's 
brave championship of the name and religion of the 
Lord Jesus Christ; but in the text, Paul is not look- 
ing upon this championship within its narrow limits 
as a fact, or in its rigid limits as a history, but he is 
regarding it rather as a development, as the outcome 
and flowering in him of his nature and the grace of 
God. And so we can, if we please, substitute for 



390 CHRISTIAN WARFARE. 

every one of Paul's poetical and triumphant allusious 
the name of that great quality which finds expression 
in it. "I have fought a good fight," here we have 
his courage and his devotion; "I have fini&hed my 
course," this shows his constancy and his persever- 
ance ; "I have kept the faith," here all his other qual- 
ities are crowned with his fidelity. 

Look first at the courage and devotion which are 
implied in the first clause, always rare qualities, and 
rarer still in that combination with other qualities 
in which we find them here. What passes for cour- 
age is not extremely rare, and there may be thou- 
sands who can justly claim credit for those modified 
self-sacrifices which we now commonly take to be the 
legitimate and normal exhibitions of religious devo- 
tiou. 

But there is, under true moral courage, a temper 
deeper, purer, rarer than its own, and without which 
a man, though he make splendid sacrifices, and gild 
his life with chivalrous deeds, and carry off the 
wreath from many a contest, does, after all, but sim- 
ulate courage, and carry devotion as he bears his 
helmet, only on the outside of himself; and that is 
what we call earnestness, the outspring of profound 
conviction, and the upspriug of a serious, manly, 
far-reaching purpose. Paul made his whole life a 
fight, because faith in him was vision, hope was sub- 
stance, and the palms of victory as real and as sure 
as the Olympic laurel- wreaths. Who will fight for 
what he does not believe in? or hold a rugged road, 
trampling on thorns, buffeted with the scorns and 



CHRISTIAN WARFARE. 391 

flings of malice, stung by the thousand wasps of 
envy, slander, and contempt? Who will press along 
this fearful road towards a goal he only dreams of, 
or a mark he sees, only when feeling is rapt into 
enthusiam, and faith fanned by the summer gales of 
heaven ? 

Nothing is more religious than earnestness, and a 
religion without it is a holiday tree, set up before 
your house, without a root, and as sure to die as the 
honest sun is to shrivel it. The feeling that life 
offers you a distinct problem, that it sets before you 
a business worthy of your talents, that it holds up 
an honorable prize, and points forward to a glorious 
reward, that feeling alone will redeem you from lit- 
tleness and purge you from meanness, and lift you, 
in your thought and in your work, into an atmos- 
phere of nobility and heroism. And then if you 
season this quality with divine salt, if you top nature 
with giace, and give your work here the scope of the 
infinite hereafter, you have in you the best leaven 
that ever fermented in human character. 

It seems, if you scan carefully the marks of the 
time, that no element is more wanted by us than this. 
Our very faith is limp and jointless, because our 
hearts have not earnest hold upon it. Our very 
morality lacks manfulness and spinal vigor, because 
we no longer feed it on a healthy, bone-making diet. 
Our diplomacy, in this age, is growing more honest, 
and our morality more diplomatic. The best men 
we have, you will see bowing down at the feet of 
immoral greatness, or picking their way among a 



392 CHRISTIAN WARFARE. 

crowd of private vices, to burn their incense before 
some accidental public virtue. We have one language 
for the rich man, and another for the poor. If we 
talk of a nabob's wickedness, we do it in the mildest 
Greek ; but if we find that wickedness in some pour 
wretch of a custom-house porter orgauger, we thun- 
der at it in the halest old Saxon. 

We preach against sin on Sunday, and vote for it 
on Monday ; abuse the devil in church, and shake 
hands with him in the market-place. Men destitute 
of the very instincts of virtue, without the first prin- 
ciple of morality, and living in brazen defiance of 
the restraints of decent opinion, have won the high- 
est prizes of the market and of the forum, and lev- 
elled in luxury, and lorded it over our great cities, 
and become dictators in society and in politics ; and 
they could do this because we stood ready to sponge 
out half the gospel, in our insane admiration of that 
darling of the multitude, Success. Such careers 
have shamed us over and over again, till honest men 
and the moral feeling of the country have almost 
despaired of our redemption ; till our politics have be- 
come a putrid sea on which everything can hope to 
float if it be light and empty enough, and in which 
virtue, merit, ability, every well-ballasted thing, seem 
to go to the bottom by sheer force of gravitation. 

All honor to the men, few though they are, the 
fewer, the greater honor, who stand like headlights 
along this turbid sea of politics ; men who have 
convictions and are true to them ; men of char- 
acter, made strong by earnestness, and pure by 



CHRISTIAN WARFARE. 393 

religion ; men who make office great, and need no 
flattery to save them from the consciousness that they 
are smaller than they look, and that their official 
shadow is the only mark they are like to leave on 
" the sands of time." 

Earnestness, even in a bad cause, is better than 
hollow pretension in a good one. And you find, 
in individual instances, a bloom of heroic devotion, 
a generous gallantry of spirit, an uncomplaining for- 
titude, and a knightly loyalty that extort our ad- 
miration, though we have to temper it with our 
regrets. It is not long since we saw these quali- 
ties conspicuous and blazing on the battle-fields of 
our own country. That was when we were all 
in earnest. Is there a reaction against the strain 
of those deadly days? Even a New York paper, 
that loves religion with the love a man has for his 
enemy, gravely admits that the country stands in 
need of a revival of religion. But if a revival only 
go so far as to multiply christians, christians of 
the common type, then we may doubt whether it 
would or could lay the axe at the root of the evil 
we are suffering from. Revive faith, revive moral 
earnestness, revive conscience, revive the two tables 
of the law, revive that apostolic honesty that made 
the unseen world as real to a man's purpose as it 
was to his judgment, and turned life into a fight 
for it and a struggle to win it, revive these, and all 
the rest will follow. 



THE CHRISTIAN EACE. 



" I have finished my course." — 2 Tim. iv, 7. 

As the first clause of this text is the declaration 
and forcible expression of the apostle's courage and 
devotion, so, as I have said, the second clause is a 
poetic and figurative exhibition of his constancy and 
perseverance. "I have finished my course." The word 
"finished " is a technical word ; that is, it is the word 
appropriated by the runners in a race, and used, in 
the description of their athletic contests, to denote 
the complete fulfilment of the race, to show that the 
man who had undertaken to run for the prize had not 
failed to reach the goal, and had not broken any of 
the rules which every runner was bound to observe. 
This is the technical meaning of the word. But Paul 
evidently gives it a larger meaning, for he means 
that he has not only run the course, keeping all the 
rules, but that he has run it successfully ; he has won 
the prize. "Henceforth," he cries, " there is a crown 
laid up for me." He had shown his constancy by 
adhering to the prescribed course and overcoming 
all the difficulties in his way, and he had shown his 
perseverance by continuing to do so to the end. For 
perseverance is constancy prolonged ; it is the running 



THE CHRISTIAN RACE. 395 

kept up till you touch the pillar that marks the goal. 
Perseverance is the image of constancy, with the 
wreath of laurels upon its head : that is all the differ- 
ence there is between them ; constancy, is running ; 
perseverance, is finishing the race. And this, as you 
can see, serves to correct and readjust those notions 
which are so often held respecting perseverance, as 
if it were, in and of itself, a special virtue or an 
independent grace, standing apart, within a partic- 
ular theological enclosure, into which you could get 
admission only by a peculiar wicket, with a double 
lock on it, and a mysterious key to open it. Many 
have talked, tautologically, of "final perseverance," 
as if there could be any kind of perseverance that 
should not be final. We might as well and consis- 
tently speak of saline salt, or wet water, in fact, 
more consistently, for salt loses its savor, and water 
freezes into ice, but perseverance never ceases to 
persevere, and if you do not find it coming in at the 
end of the race, abreast of all competitors, you may 
be perfectly sure it never entered the race, and never 
ran at all. You can see, then, what an error there is 
in that conception of perseverance which erects it 
into a virtue by itself, and teaches us to pray for it as 
if it were a policy of insurance. Such a prayer, if it 
were not the outcome of innocent misapprehension, 
would be blasphemous, for it would amount to 
this: "Save me in the end, Lord, whatever may 
become of me in the middle ! I doubt now whether 
I am in the right path, but I pray that I may come 
out right at last. I have not much perseverance 



396 THE CHRISTIAN RACE. 

at present, but I want final perseverance. I don't 
live exactly as I ought to, but I hope to die like a 
good christian." Well, brethren, if we make this 
mistake, and hope to retrieve ourselves by what we 
call " final perseverance," it will take a great deal of 
it to save us, there is no doubt about that. 

But if perseverance expresses only the results of 
constancy, so does constancy, in its turn, give us 
only a definite aspect of our virtues, and not our 
virtues themselves ; for it takes a great many graces, 
virtues, and powers, to produce constancy, and more 
in some men than in others. Every life, iu truth, 
has its own moral assessment. We are taxed un- 
equally. We do not all employ the same capital, and 
we do not all carry the same dead- weight of mort- 
gages. Differing in this way, as we do, constancy, 
which means, in good, straightforward Saxon, stand-. 
ing by and standing up to our undertaking, mikes 
very unequal drafts upon us, and calls for very dif- 
ferent faculties and virtues in different men. Take 
a christian man who is engaged in a large business, 
that involves him in tangles of difficulty with sharp 
practicers upon his own forbearance, and sometimes 
in lawsuits whose doubtful issues hang like storm- 
clouds along the edges of his life, *and the graces 
that man has need of are very different from those 
which blossom, almost spontaneously, in the serene 
and smiling security of the salaried clerk or book- 
keeper who serves him. Or, take a pure, honest, 
conscientious member of your political party, and set 
him before the people as a candidate for office, aud 



THE CHHISTIAN KACE. 397 

let the politicians begin to hatckel him, and the news- 
papers shed ink on him, and the horns of calumny 
blow upon him, and the scavengers of scandal, and the 
mongers of that social old junk-shop known as " gos- 
sip," begin to rake in his personal privacy and his fam- 
ily histories, and if that candidate be a christian, and 
mean to be constant to his faith, the graces he needs 
would exhaust the alphabet in the spelling, and 
make large demands on the et cetera. Religion comes 
cheap to some men, because they have to pay out so 
little ; but there are positions in life that use it up 
about as fast as a man can take it in, and constancy 
becomes a hand-to-hand struggle with the incarnate 
evils that threaten to overthrow it, or make the 
ground too slippery for it to stand upon. 

Most men are held to a show of constancy by the 
mere habits of life. They would have to fight to es- 
cape from their places. They stand up in a frame- 
work of custom and usage, which is like the iron 
cage in which Louis XI used to shut up a political 
enemy, and in which a cardinal languished for a 
dozen years, so close fitting that the poor prisoner 
could neither stand nor lie. 

Good habits are certainly the choice fruit of good 
principles ; but you can have the habits without the 
principles, and in that case habit is a mere strait- 
jacket. Is it a thing for me to boast of that I do 
not steal? I have no temptation to steal. Is it any 
credit to me that I lead a decorous life? Why, my 
very profession helps me to that. But bring me 
down to the stern choice of alternatives, put me 

17 



398 THE CHRISTIAN RACE. 

where I have under my eyes a starving family, where 
my morning salutation comes from the pining child 
I love as I do my life, and where, to my rankling 
sense of injury, law mocks me as a fierce irony, and 
charity stings me like a sarcasm upon the justice of 
God, then lay your loaf of bread in my sight, and 
you can see of what stuff I am made. 

We stand so thick in society that we hold one 
another up as long as we all lean or move in the 
same direction; but let society go one way, while 
your conscience and you go another, give practical 
meaning to that old apostolic phrase, which to Paul, 
and in Paul's day, had the significance of life and 
death, "coming out from the world," and "being 
separate," then constancy becomes a war-record, you 
score your days by your scars, and you fight, like 
Cromwell's old Ironsides, with one eye to your ene- 
my and the other to your ammunition. 

Poor Pope the poet — I call him poor only because 
of his infirmities — was never equal to the day's duty 
till his servants and nurses had cased him and laced 
up his little body in a suit of very stiff buckram. 
You can hide a great many infirmities under moral 
buckram. Many a man walks straight who has no 
backbone except his buckram suit. He seems to be 
constant, but it is because there is so much starch in 
him. It is not the moral laws that sustain him, but 
his respectable and dignified social position. He 
leans up against that, and when the tempter leers in 
his face, or he is surprised, by some doubtful over- 
ture, he asks, not, "What would God have me do?" 



THE CHRISTIAN RACE. 399 

but simply, " What will men say ? " That is his read- 
ing of the situation. It behooves every christian 
man to ask, Why am I as I am ? Why am I virtuous, 
honest, upright? For it is a branch of the eternal 
truih, that a man may be a slave of his own virtues 
as well as of his own vices , while God calls for free 
men, and wants no servant who is not enfranchised 
by the heart's choice. Natural religion is beautiful ; 
but it is a weed, it grows indigenously, no thanks to 
us. The religion of Christ is a flower of choice : 
you must plant it, you must cultivate it, you must 
grow it. 

I ask you to consider the notable fact that, at root, 
the two words " constancy " and " consistency " are the 
same, that is, they both have the same etymology, and 
represent, substantially, the same fundamental idea. 

Now, actually, in the discriminative and specializ- 
ing progress of language, they differ in this way, 
that constancy regards life and character as a unit, 
held up firmly to the object, whatever it may be ; 
consistency analyzes life or character into parts, 
and regards these parts as all-consenting, with a sin- 
gle bias and a uniform direction, in the act or fact of 
constancy. The constant man keeps himself true to 
his purpose : the consistent man makes all the minor 
streams and rivulets of his action converge toward 
his purpose. A constant christian bends his life to 
his profession : a consistent christian will admit into 
his life nothing which contradicts his profession. It 
would not do to say that there can be no constancy 
without consistency, or where would be the persever- 



400 THE CHRISTIAN RACE. 

ance of the average modern saint? but it is safe to 
say that consistency is the very spine of constancy ; 
more than that, it is the very brains of it. Life with 
us is so complex, daily growing more and more so, 
that you have to look twice before you can see how 
to throw the shuttle. Constancy sits up aloft, like 
the pattern in a Jacquard loom, and it needs consis- 
tency down below to pick out the threads and assort 
the colors. And the very complexity of life, which 
makes consistency more necessary, also renders it 
more difficult, and, I am afraid, more rare. We are 
used to rapid changes in this country, and our poli- 
tics demand peculiar dexterity on the part of public 
men, and that dexterity is sorely tempted, sometimes, 
to barter a little consistency for a commodity that 
pays a larger dividend. And then it often happens, 
per contra, that in order to be constant to one's great 
principles, he is obliged to sacrifice the appearance of 
consistency. It is a paradox with us, that we are 
frequently obliged to give up our party that we may 
be faithful to it ; and an honest statesman, who sets 
principles above party, and thinks a sound policy 
better than a popular platform, who prefers to serve 
his country rather than be honored by it, such a man 
finds himself forced to make his election between 
constancy based on a solid consistency, and a delu- 
sive consistency without an atom of constancy or 
honesty in it. 

Of course the same problem will sometimes con- 
front us in religion, and the more earnest and honest 
we may be, the more imperative it will become, that 



THE CHRISTIAN RACE. 401 

if fidelity to conscience demand that we alter our 
name, change our church, range ourselves under a 
different banner, we hold constancy first, and consis- 
tency, or the form of it, second. We may change 
without changing front. 

That is the typical idea of christian constancy : no 
two steps in the same place, but every step onward. 
A christian purpose will sweep everything into its 
own main current. Strike right the daily balance, and 
the year's last day will have no terror for you. Paul 
rejoiced when he caught, through his prison-bars, 
the light of his last day. He could hear the Master 
coming in every step the jailer took as he came 
down the stairs, into his cell. One more trial, and 
the last pang of living would be over ; no more 
scourgings, no more buffetings, no more hunger, and 
thirst, and fever, and heart-ache. Paul did not 
begin to know what he had done, what a magnificent 
victory he had won, and what a crown the coming 
ages of mankind would set upon his head. But he 
was not thinking of that crown : he saw another, in 
which he was content to be a sharer with the hum- 
blest of Christ's followers. Does it seem possible, 
brethren, that you and I can ever touch the level 
from which Paul reached up to his martyr-triumph ; 
much more, that you and I should ever, from any 
level, be lifted to the glory of participation with him 
in the crown of christian constancy? Let me do one 
day's work of the thousand that flashed an earthly 
immortality upon his name, let me live an hour of 
the rapt assurance that filled his whole life with 



402 THE CHRISTIAN RACE. 

the very presence of Jesus, and made the top of his 
cross, as he hung on it and gazed upwards, the 
very threshold of heaven's great gate. One day, one 
hour, of such doing and such living, and I could live 
or die with a faith strong enough to conquer an 
empire. Yet it needs not that. Faith annihilates' 
personalities, God calls no names, the great family of 
the redeemed knows no cousins, the humblest child 
is heir to a kingdom ; and who will tell us that even 
an angel's eye does not see in us now the splendor of 
victories as grand as Paul ever won, of heroic deeds 
on which the merciful Father smiles as tenderly as 
on the martyrdom of an apostle? Your hard trial 
is a battle; your besetting cares, your daily worries, 
your secret fears and harassments, these are your 
crosses; and whether you carry them or they carry 
you, whether ycu patiently live them down, or they 
cruelly wear you out, the very worth of your soul 
is in them, and a soul's inheritance hangs upon them. 
Your sorrows shut within them this ineffable mystery 
of future values. Not a tear falls that will not out- 
last the diamond, and you may put in it the light and 
sparkle of immortal victories. These thoughts make 
life great, till every pulse thrills with the significance 
of our origin, and every throb of the brain prophe- 
sies the grandeur of our destiny ; the earth grows 
small, man becomes immense, and we feel that to the 
very weakest of us all, may become possible, by faith 
in Jesus, that noblest psean of victorious joy, " I have 
fought a good fight, I have finished my course." 



FAITH 



" I have kept the faith." — 2 Tim. iv, 7. 

When a man is thoroughly possessed with a great 
purpose, so that he feels fairly lifted by it above all 
his surroundings, it is surprising how much he can 
bear aud suffer without giving sign or drawing groan. 
A day or two before the battle of Borodino, it was 
observed that Napoleon, while visiting the advanced 
lines of his army, frequently dismounted from his 
horse, and going to a gun would lean his head against 
the cold metal, and remain so in an attitude of great 
pain. It is against royal etiquette ever to ask a sov- 
ereign about his health, and so Napoleon's aids were 
prohibited from making any inquiries ; but as we know 
of what disease he died, and how long it had been 
growing upon him, and what terrible bodily pains 
must have accompanied it, we can sympathize with 
the great man's condition before Borodino even better 
than could his own attendants at that time. And he, 
not etiquette forbade him to groan or make sign, 
but he was compelled to silence by the very work he 
had in hand. Half the battle would be lost to him 
before the striking of a blow w T ere it known that 
he was not wholly himself, and that that splendid 



404 FAITH. 

genius was wrestling with an enemy far more to be 
dreaded than the Russians. But what was Napoleon's 
grim silence when stung with bodily suffering, com- 
pared with the heroic fortitude of Paul when he was 
writing or dictating his letter to Timothy? Hardly 
a word has Paul to say about his afflictions. 

From his tone you might suppose he was never 
more happily circumstanced in his life. Yet he was 
shut up in a sub-cellar hewn out of the solid rock, 
with no ray of sunlight possible, with fetters on his 
feet, manacles on his wrists, and death expected at 
every turn of the key in the door of the upper room 
which communicated with his lower dungeon only 
through a trap. His ration, I believe, was a little 
raw wheat, possibly roasted for him sometimes by 
his jailer ; and it is matter of wonder, as well as of 
praise to God, that he was able to command the 
means and materials for writing to his friends. 

That was the cost at which he was keeping the 
faith. The most divine part of every life is that of 
silent endurance. It is infinitely harder to keep still 
than it is to break out in clamorous indignation. It 
takes more manliness to bow down in silence than to 
strike a blow at the enemy. Oppression of others 
incarnates the devil, but repression of one's self is an 
epiphany of the angelic. Many a modern so-called 
martyr would have complained through all the last 
half of the New Testament, from Romans to He- 
brews ; but Paul was so filled with his work that, from 
all he left on record, you can hardly gather a score of 
references to what he was suffering. Now this may 



FAITH. 405 

help us to understand what Paul means by " keep- 
ing" the faith. The original word is stronger than 
our English term "keep," though we do sometimes 
employ the word " keep," in a sense nearly the same 
as that of the Greek word it here translates. We 
keep different things in very different ways. A man 
keeps a watch by simply wearing it. He keeps a 
piece of property by recording his title « and paying 
the taxes on it. He keeps a grudge by paying the 
taxes on that, and pretty heavy taxes he often finds 
them to be. He keeps a promise by doing what he 
promised, and he keeps his character by simply 
maintaining it as it was. But we have a use of the 
word which implies the retention of a thing in despite 
of adverse efforts to deprive us of it. A man keeps 
his temper when his circumstances provoke him to 
let it go. He keeps his ground when an assailant is 
trying to push him to the wall, as a general keeps 
the field when he has won a battle. And it is in 
this sense of active, not passive, retention ; in that 
sense which illustrates the virtues we have found in 
the preceding clauses of the text ; in the sense of de- 
votion, of constancy, of perseverance, that the word 
tc keep " is here used. Rarely does it happen to any 
man now, to keep his faith on such terms, and in such 
conditions as gave such significance to the apostle's 
declaration. It might rather be said of us that we 
are kept by the faith, and not too well kept. What 
seasoning we have, comes from our religion, and we 
have not enough surplus to give back much to religion. 
It is incontestable that in the early years of the 

17* 



406 FAITH. 

gospel the truth borrowed its most persuasive power 
from the unimpeachable lives and characters of those 
who professed it. Men said, "Look at these disci- 
ples. They are a whole heaven above any other peo- 
ple we know. Now there must be something extraor- 
dinary in the faith that makes such men ! " That was 
the argument then. 

But what is it now? Do not look at these disci- 
ples ! They are not by any means so good as the 
soil they grow in ; the gospel can produce far better 
specimens than they are. Look at that, and don't 
mind these half-gospelled christians." We are not apt 
to think much of what costs us nothing to keep, and 
this is the reason why you always find so much vigor- 
ous prosperity under the black shadows of persecu- 
tion and in the white heats of fanaticism. A proselyte 
is generally a pushing, enterprising, loud-tongued 
partisan, because he is discussing questions which 
have pumped his heart full. No man holds his creed 
with so tight a grip as the man who has had to fight 
for it ; and if I wanted to buy up a renegade, I would 
spread my price or publish the wages of apostasy, 
not before the face of a proselyte or a neophyte, but 
before some man who got his doctrines as he got the 
acres and the cattle of his patrimony, by inheritance 
and succession. A man may hold a creed without 
knowing why he holds it ; but when a man takes up 
a new creed he must have a reason for it. You will 
find a great deal of hard, tough logic in your Baptist 
brethren ; and the explanation comes from the fact 
that a Methodist or a Presbyterian cannot become a 



FAITH. 407 

Baptist without a deal of sound, solid, argumentative 
thinking ; and having once got the habit of planking 
his platform with Bible syllogisms, he can never give 
it up. But let me say just here, that of course, " keep- 
ing" the faith does not mean that a man's intellectual 
convictions, or his religious beliefs, are to remain for- 
ever the same. Don't we make a mistake occasion- 
ally at this point, and cry out about the old land- 
marks as if it did not make so much difference where 
they stood if one only stood by them ? 

The old landmarks are fundamental principles, but 
we treat them sometimes as if they were a set of an- 
tiquarian mile-pobts, set up along the geographical 
borders of the Lord's territory. Was not the relig- 
ion of Jesus a larger and richer faith to Paul when he 
wrote to Timothy than it was when he took his 
biinded way to the house of Judas ? Who best kept 
his lord's talents, the man who was so afraid of rust 
and dust that he wrapped his talent delicately in a 
napkin, or the man who turned his capital over and 
over till he saw it doubled ? There is the error of 
half of our lives, that we take religion in us to be 
the harvest, which the Lord is reaping, instead of 
the sowing, which we are to bring into the multipli- 
cation and maturity of fruitage. There is nothing 
arithmetical in faith. You can't help religion by the 
multiplication-table. You are not a whit stronger be- 
cause you hold thirty-nine articles rather than thirty- 
eight. There is no more piety in five points than 
there is in three. You can be just as evangelical in 
one long paragraph as you can in six short ones, and it 



408 FAITH. 

makes no sort of difference, provided you believe it, 
whether you sign your confession at the top or at 
the bottom. A convention of learned men in Eu- 
rope were recently disputing about the dogma called 
the " Procession of the Holy Ghost," a dispute that 
hinges on one Latin word, filioque, whether that 
should be in or out. It seemed like the Middle A^es 
resurrected into the life and bustle of the nineteenth 
century. Those venerable old heads most of them 
Catholic priests, and thererbre with no wives to 
remind them how the fashion of the world chau- 
geth, had a musty scent of the cloister and the 
sepulchre ; and they had no conception of the vast 
extent of that plain physiological law, that when the 
spirit is flown the body is dead, and you cannot bring 
back the life by singing incautations over it. No ! 
faith is a thing that grows, it lives by growing. 
Paul grew and his faith grew, and the treasure he 
was keeping when he sang his swan-song in the old 
prison was every way larger than it was when he 
picked it up on the mountains as he was going to 
Damascus. 

But I wish to ask your attention to the various 
characters which Paul ascribed or accorded to the 
faith which he kept, or the characters which we have 
to give it in estimating the various relations in which 
Paul stood to it, and the relations which we sustain 
to it in our turn. For the keeping of the faith cer- 
tainly comprehends the different attitudes which we 
maintain toward it, aud which we find exemplified 
most clearly and fully in the history of the apostle. 



FAITH. 409 

Firstly, he kept the faith as a deposit. The gospel 
had been intrusted to him, and he felt bound to pre- 
serve it in its integrity and for its divinely appointed 
uses. Now I have no time to enlarge this thought, but 
I do wish to urge upon you the solemn tact that we all 
hold this relation toward the christian faith as a body 
of truth committed to us by Almighty God. It is 
true, and I grant it, all truth is a trust from God. 
God gave us the faculties to seek and to appropriate 
it, and we are so constituted that the truth is as ne- 
cessary to our intellectual and moral development, as 
food is to our physical nurture. There is an ever- 
lasting law that conditions all manhood and woman- 
hood on the amount of truth we absorb. Not God 
alone, but nature, abhors a lie, and the worst lie is 
the moral vacuum, that condition in which a man 
knows nothing, and takes pains to know it well. 
When you hear any one boast of his indifference to 
knowledge, you mingle pity with contempt for him, 
because his indifference asperses our common human- 
ity and is a fraud upon the noblest powers conferred 
on man. Truth is sacred, and we owe it the very 
same allegiance we owe our own nature ; and how 
much more true, if possible, this must be of the only 
knowledge we have, or can have, that vindicates our 
nature itself, and cuts out for it a niche in the im- 
mortal design of the universe, and throws us hisrh in 
rank among the sphered intelligences of the divine 
power ! Indifference to religion is disloyalty to our 
own nature. The gospel is a trust to every human 
being for which God and his own soul will hold every 



410 FAITH. 

man responsible hereafter. Secondly, but I add that 
Paul kept the faith, not only as a deposit, but as a 
law. He saw the truth in it, and he honored it, as 
every man ought to do, but beyond that he saw and 
felt the supreme urgency with which that truth comes 
to every man as the only redeeming and saving 
power. Paul was made of such fiery stuff that com- 
bustion in him was a necessity, and he knew the only 
question was, should it be the fierce flame of a mis- 
guided and bigoted zealot, or the steady and tem- 
pered glow of the noblest passions, serving at length 
to light up the " glory that shall be hereafter." There 
are many such men, made to burn themselves out on 
one track or the other, rushing through life in the 
frenzied fever of a profligate's chase after pleasure 
or a gambler's reckless toss for wealth or honors ; 
or else, with a nobler ambition, kindling all their 
powers, and fusing all their nature, in one generous 
sacrifice on the altar of their country and their Lord. 
Eeligion wakes in us the sleeping divinities.; but if 
our powers, like Elijah's Baal, have gone on a jour- 
ney, religion may never overtake them. To Paul, 
life meant his religion. 

"For me to live is Christ." There is all the poe- 
try of heroism in that line. It is bad to be dead to 
religion, but it is far worse to be dead in it. We 
cannot live without breathing, but if we are under 
water every breath is dangerous. If a man does not 
keep his faith as a law to him, he turns it into an 
element of deceit and hypocrisy, and every prayer 
he makes carries with it the danger of choking him. 



FAITH. 411 

Finally, let me say that Paul kept the faith as a 
blessing to be diffused, and as a hope to be enjoyed 
by him. But I suppose the two went together with 
him, as they always do with us. If you have relig- 
ion enough for your owm comfort, you can always 
spare enough for your neighbors ; and on the other 
hand, the more you distribute abroad, the more you 
have at home. Show me man or woman going 
about as a messenger of good cheer, bent on errands 
of mercy and charity among the sick, the poor, the 
afflicted, and I know where to find a house gladdened 
with the sunshine of content. A religion that grum- 
bles indoors w r raps itself in a thick shadow whenever 
it goes out. A hard voice among the children at 
home speaks no soft words by a sick-bed, and the 
christian who frets and scolds at his own fireside' 
teaches few lessons of content under the roofs of the 
needy. Eeligion must first fill the man himself, or 
how can you expect him to overflow in its kindly 
offices and brotherly charities ? Paul was full of it, 
and especially of that portion which we know the 
least of. I mean its serene and contented spirit, and 
its cheeiful, triumphant welcome of the future. Sit- 
ting on the very edge of death, he saw all beyond 
brighter and fairer than any poet's dream or proph- 
et's vision. Tortured in body, his soul was as clear 
as crystal, and shone with the image of his beloved 
Master. At every blow that fell, at every chain 
that galled, he asked only, "Is this all I can bear 
for thee, thou honored Lord?" And when he had 
crowded his life with deeds that might have sown 



41 FAITH. 

an age with examples of self-denial and of tireless 
energy, he seemed only to ask, "Is this all I can do 
for thee, my blessed Lord?" It is all there, my 
brethren, for us, if we will but take it, all the fervor, 
all the courage, all the measureless content, all the 
uplift and the outlook of triumphant hope ; all there 
for any man who has the power so to measure the 
height and breadth of God's truth, and to keep the 
faith, in his heart and in his life, as a trust, as a law, 
and as a hope. 



This fragment of a funeral discourse, in which occurs a 
remarkable prophecy of Mr. Haughwout's own death, will 
appropriately close the volume. 



''READY TO BE OFFERED. 5 



"For lam now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure 
is at hand.'" — 2 Tim. iv, 6. 

A braver heart never beat in the breast of man 
than that of the Apostle Paul. Mere human courage 
never rose on the wings of faith and hope, as cour- 
age rose in him, above all the ordinary fears and 
interests of life, to the heights of a perfect indiffer- 
ence to self and an absolute immergence in the 
divine will ; nor can you find an example in history 
which leaves you less to suspect in regard to the 
sources and qualities of the courage displayed. 
There had been a time when the apostle could lay 
claim only to those nobler attributes of a brave man 
which draw their sustenance from the native excel- 
lence of the heart, and which, fired with the lofty 
sentiments of humanity or duty or religious zeal, 
expand into the character of the hero, and challenge 
the undying remembrance of history. Such a hero 
Paul might have become, if the grace of God had 



414 



not elected him for a still greater and more glorious 
career. Armed with the supreme power of his 
nation, and girding his sword upon his thigh, Paul 
would have rode over the land extirpating heresy 
with as savage and reckless a fanaticism as that of 
the boldest Crusader, and he would have rode down 
his enemy, in that cause, with as grim an eagerness, 
as unrelenting a purpose, as power, cased in mail, 
ever showed a vanquished foe. If the success of 
Pharisaism had depended on his right arm, he would 
have drawn no rein and spared no blow, though he 
had seen Death riding up to meet him, or the grave 
gaping under his feet. But how changed was all this 
after the persecuted Saviour had met him upon his 
bloody raid to Damascus. Paul did not lose any of 
his rich natural endowments, his manhood did not 
shrink in that fiery revelation. Such as God had 
made him he remained, a man, like the royal Saul of 
old Israel, towering head and shoulders above all the 
people ; a man whose sword might have carved out 
kingdoms, but whose pen, under God, has proved 
mightier than the sword of any hero who ever wrote 
his name on the world in blood and tears. From 
the day of his new birth he had no care, no fear, no 
hope, no interest, but such as lay in his mission as 
the apostle of Jesus. With his grasping and com- 
prehensive faith, he brought eternity so uear him 
that his own selfhood was lost and swallowed up, 
and the world itself became but a portal thrDugh 
which the soul might enter on its boundless inheri- 
tance. He knew nothing but " Christ and him cruci- 



415 

fied." Whether he stood on Mars' Hill, with the 
fate of Socrates before him, or preached in the syna- 
gogue, where his countrymen were only waiting to 
stone him, or lay along the roadside, the half-lifeless 
victim of their murderous brutality, or pined in dun- 
geons from which his hope saw no way of exit but 
by the hand of violence, it was all the same to him ; 
his courage never drooped for an instant, his nerve 
never trembled, and his serene confidence never for- 
sook him. Dragged before kings and rulers, neither 
their authority nor their state overcame or dazzled 
him ; and, if possible, his heart swelled with a still 
stronger resolution and his eye burned with a more 
defiant boldness ; and he flung his words of daring 
rebuke at the cowering Felix, and threw back the 
sarcasm at the courtly Agrippa, with a steadiness 
and firmness such only as find a precedent or a com- 
parison in the example of his divine Master himself, 
when he denounced to their faces the crimes and 
hypocrisy of the Pharisees. 

And when, at length, his career was well nigh run, 
and he lay on the rocky floor of the Mamertine 
Prison, cut off from air and sunlight, and expecting 
in every approaching footstep the coming of the 
executioner, what victor ever sent up such a note of 
jubilant gladness, such a burst of eager and rejoi- 
cing anticipation, as the word of our text? Who 
would guess that the soul which here displays itself, 
and "mounts up with wings as an eagle," was even 
then struggling with the pains of the body, and 
gathering up its energies to meet the tortures of a 
martyr's doom? 



416 

When we look at this picture, when we see this 
wonderful self-absorption in the power of an earnest 
purpose, we know that we are looking at the highest 
achievements of a christian faith ; that there is but 
one thing in the world, but one moral principle, but 
one spiritual element which is capable of effecting 
such marvels of conquest over the flesh and such 
entire self-incorporation with the will and purpose of 
God. We cannot now examine all the elements of 
that pure and unselfish spirit which breathes in the 
apostle's character ; but we may take one single ex- 
hibition of this spirit, and we may ask, What are 
the conditions of that unconcern which the apostle 
manifests as to the time of his departure ? What are 
the elements of the christian's readiness to die? We 
must observe that there is a vast distinction between 
the readiness of the true christian for death, and the 
indifference of the sinful or the mere carelessness of 
the dull and sluggish man. Paul gave proof that his 
spirit was not an indifference to death, when he told 
his brethren that, though he preferred to depart be- 
cause it was " far better," yet he was glad he was to 
continue with them because that seemed necessary 
to them. 

There is a great variety of tempers which can, in 
the very presence of death, simulate and counterfeit 
all the negative characteristics of a true christian 
resignation ; but who would pronounce the death of 
an ignorant heathen, who smiles in the security of 
his deluded hopes, a triumph of resignation to God? 

We feel that such an hour demands, that the dig- 



417 



irity of the soul demands, some intelligent apprehen- 
sion of man's condition and prospects, and that 
without this intelligence the passive stoicism of 
strong nerves or the unmoved fortitude of a firm 
will is little above the tranquil stolidity of the 
animal. No ! the readiness of the christian is not a 
question of nerves. It does not borrow its forti- 
tude from a strong will, nor owe its cheerfulness to 
unbroken animal spirits. It is not mere resignation. 
It does not yield to God's will because it cannot 
escape from it : this would be a slavish spirit, 
unworthy of a christian. But it takes its strength 
from knowledge, the knowledge of Chiist; its power 
is that of au overcoming faith ; its joy is the kind- 
ling eagerness of anticipation and assurance ; and 
it conquers, not by passive endurance, but by the 
intense activity and overcoming energy of the soul. 
Here is the diiference between the unchristian hero 
and the christiau : the one bravely suffers death, the 
other joyfully accepts it; the one is resigned to it, 
the other prefers it because it is God's will ; the 
one cries, " Thy will be done and my will submit !" 
the other cries, " Thy will be done ! I have no will 
but thine " ; and when death comes before him as a 
duty, he takes it as a duty, and considers that of 
all duties, this is followed by the. most glorious re- 
ward. There are always certain preferences natural 
to us, which make death harder at some times than 
it would be at others. And perhaps there is none of 
us who would not willingly make a covenant with 
death and hold himself ready to answer at death's 



418 



call, could he only be permitted to choose his own 
time. And they are these lurking preferences which 
even the christian finds it most difficult to overcome. 

We cannot believe that God chooses best and most 
wisely, both for us and for our friends, and we pro- 
nounce his providence mysterious because he crosses 
these natural preferences, violates them, and de- 
ranges all the plans and hopes we had built up upon 
them. We all think, and agree in thinking, that 
death comes reasonably and seasonablyto the aged, 
because we can see then that his coming brings the 
fewest disappointments ; embraces, perhaps, the nar- 
rowest circle of deep and poignant grief, and is 
countervailed by large benefits and blessings both to 
the living and the dead. The tears that fall upon 
the ashes of the aged father and mother leave no 
acrid bitterness behind them, and serve but as the 
balm to anoint a loving remembrance in the hearts 
of their children. 

But oh, how immeasurably bitter are the tears that 
are wrung from the hearts which yearn, and will not, 
cannot cease to yearn, through long, aching years, 
for the strong staff that was broken in the pride and 
glory of its strength ; for the manly arm that was 
withered, and the manly form that was laid low, 
while yet the dew of their youth was upon them, 
and their hopes had lost none of their bloom ! 
This is the hardest lot, whether for ourselves or for 
our friends, which the natural heart is constrained to 
accept. Here our short-sighted folly arraigns the 
wisdom of God, and we lay to his charge all the 



419 



wrecks of our cherished contrivances and our far- 
reaching hopes. But here, also, comes the test of 
our faith as christians ; and if we are able to rise, 
like the apostle, above and out of the entangle- 
ments of self, if we are equal to the mastery over 
our natural preferences, and the courageous choice 
of God's will as our only wish, then we shall not 
care when death comes, so it come only in God's 
time, or how it comes, so it come in God's appointed 
way. 

But if there is one desire which we could be per- 
mitted to have gratified, we should pray that death, 
when it comes, might find us at our work, standing 
at our allotted .post of duty and girded with all our 
armor on. The true soldier covets his departure, 
when the hour draws nigh, at the head of the charg- 
ing column, in the shock of battle, in the clash of 
arms, and in the moment of victory. And I have 
heard one who has spent his life battling with the 
clangers of the ocean, to whom the wild waste of 
waters was as the land, and the deck of his ship 
only less clear than his own fireside, utter the wish 
that when God called him he might summon him 
from the very helm of his ship, when he stood, as he 
had so often stood, guiding her course through the 
angry floods, and fighting with the elements to pre- 
serve the lives of those who had been intrusted to 
him Where should we be found, when God sum- 
mons us, more fitly than just where he has stationed 
us, and bidden us do our work in this world? Oh, 
may my latest breath be drawn, so please God, while 



420 

I stand preaching his blessed truth ! May my last 
word be a plea with sinners for the gospel of Christ ! 
May I fall just where I stand, in my humble place 
as a watchman ou the battlements of Zion, and my 
eyes close upon the world with these living witnesses 
around me that I have tried to be faithful to my 
mission, and done my duty up to the very last ! 



THE EKD. 



?s* 






■ ,Ki 




